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Zhz Xafee Enalisb Classics 



BUENS 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



EDITED FOR SCHOOL USE 
BY 

GEORGE B. AITON 

STATE INSPECTOR OF HIGH SCHOOLS, MINNESOTA 



CHICAGO 
SCOTT, FORESMAN & CO. 

1898 



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Cx „ 



13952 



Copyright 1898 
By SCOTT, FORESMAN & COMPANY 












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2nd COPY, 
1898. 






CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface 7 

Introduction 9 

Map 10 

Carlyle 11 

Burns 23 

Comments on the Essay .... 30 

Bibliography 39 

Poems of Burns Named in the Essay . . 40 

Text 43 

Glossary 131 

Notes 137 



PREFACE 

This edition of Carlyle's Essay on Burns has 
been prepared for the use of students iu secondary 
schools. It presents the text as the author left 
it, and such introduction and notes as are thought 
likely to assist the student. 

With this purpose in mind, the sketches of 
Carlyle and Burns have been restricted to the parts 
of their lives pertinent to the essay under consider- 
ation. It is impossible within the brief limits of 
an introduction to give a balanced account of two 
remarkable men and an equally remarkable essay. 
For an adequate life of the essayist the reader is 
referred to Froude's Carlyle and to Carlyle's own 
Reminiscences and Letters. The most satisfactory 
view of Burns may be had from Dr. Chambers's 
Life and Works of Robert Burns (4 vols. Long- 
man's), but Blackie's Burns, in the Great Writers 
Series, will answer. It is sufficient for oar purpose 
to sketch an outline of Carlyle's life, indicating 
how by study he became a thinker, what he stood 
for and why he was the particular man of letters 
to write an essay on Burns that would repay study. 



8 PREFACE 

To this must be added the pertinent facts of 
Burns 's life, in order that Carlyle's references may 
be understood. We shall also desire some account 
of the place this essay fills in literature. 

A short list of reference books is given to em- 
phasize the importance of having and using a 
serviceable school library. A list of those of 
Burns 's poems which Carlyle mentions has been 
arranged in chronological order. The notes are 
intended merely to clear up certain allusions or to 
call attention to important thought. It has not 
been considered advisable to give explanations of 
what may be inferred from the text, or to embar- 
rass the student with remarks upon proper names 
with which he is already familiar. A like desire 
to disencumber the notes has led to the insertion, 
in the glossary, of such Lowland words as are 
found in Carlyle's numerous but always judicious 

quotations. 

G. B. A. 
Minneapolis, August, 1898. 



INTRODUCTION 



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INTRODUCTION 

CAT.L \ 

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12 INTRODUCTION 

pious, the just and the wise. " Of his father, he 
says: "More remarkable man than my father I 
have never met in my journey through life ; ster- 
ling sincerity in thought, word, and deed, most 
quiet but capable of blazing into whirlwinds when 
needful, and such a flash of just insight and brief 
natural eloquence and emphasis, true to every 
feature of it, as I have never known in any other. 
Humour of a most grim Scandinavian type he 
occasionally had; wit rarely or never — too serious 
for wit. My excellent mother, with perhaps the 
deeper piety in most senses, had also the most 
sport. No man of my day, or hardly any man, 
can have had better parents." We are interested 
in this account of Oarlyle's ancestry because ability 
does not spring from the dull-witted in a single 
generation. Education of the right sort will 
improve any mind, but a boy without good blood in 
him cannot make much of a man. 

The Carlyles were prosperous while their chil- 
dren were growing up. Their housekeeping, 
though simple, was scrupulously neat. The chil- 
dren ran barefoot in summer and had an abundance 
of the simple but exceedingly nutritious food of 
the Scottish peasantry, consisting chiefly of oat- 
meal porridge, scones, milk, cheese and potatoes. 
Carlyle's mother began to teach him so early that 
he could not remember the time when he was 
unable to read. At seven he was sent to the vil- 
lage school and pronounced ready for Latin. At 



CARLYLE 13 

ten he was fondly destined for the Presbyterian 
ministry, and was sent to the grammar school at 
Annan, a few miles down the valley, where he 
learned to overcome homesickness, bullies, French, 
Latin, mathematics and the Greek alphabet — not 
a bad beginning for one who was to become versed 
in literature. 

In the autumn of 1809, though he was not quite 
fourteen, it was decided, despite the shaking of wise 
heads in the village, to send Thomas Oarlyle to 
the University of Edinburgh. Carlyle's parents 
deserve credit for their self-sacrifice, for Thomas 
was now old enough to labor, and his help would 
have been very acceptable ; but parental pride came 
to the rescue, and Thomas, though he never 
became a minister, fully justified all expectations. 
Up Annandale and over the fells, twenty miles a 
day, every foot of the way historic ground — and Car- 
lyle just the kind of boy to enjoy it — he trudged, 
to Edinburgh. According to the custom pre- 
vailing among the sons of working people, Carlyle 
boarded himself while at the university, depending 
mainly on provisions sent from home by the carrier, 
the weekly arrival of whose cart was a social feature 
of the countryside. As a student, he worked hard 
and read omnivorously, gaining recognition, 
strangely enough, in the department of mathematics 
only. He himself intimates that the library was 
the best part of the university. "Nay, from the 
chaos of that library, I succeeded in fishing up 



14 INTRODUCTION 

more books than had been known to the keeper 
thereof." 

Having in due time brought his university course 
to a conclusion, Carlyle registered as a non-resident 
divinity student. He left the old library and his 
scanty quarters for home, as, indeed, he had not 
failed to do at the end of each college year. For- 
tunately the mathematical instructorship in the 
Annan school fell vacant, and Carlyle, now nine- 
teen years old, received the appointment at a salary 
of about £60 a year, quite sufficient to render him 
independent and to put him in the way of saving 
something for a future course, still supposed to be 
theology. The young instructor is said to have 
done his work faithfully, but to have disliked 
teaching. He shunned society; shut himself up 
with his books, and spent his vacations with his 
parents, who had now removed with the entire 
family to the farm of Mainhill, a few miles up the 
road Carlyle used to take for the university. Two 
years passed in this way, when university influ- 
ence procured him a better position as master of a 
new classical and mathematical school at the sea- 
coast town of Kirkcaldy, some twenty miles to the 
north of Edinburgh. Here he had the friendship 
and the companionship of Edward Irving, also an 
Annandale boy, a graduate of the University of 
Edinburgh and a rural divinity student, but now 
master of a competing school in Kirkcaldy. Car- 
lyle, doubtless through the influence of his new 



CARLYLE 15 

friend, with whom he walked and talked summer 
nights on the Kirkcaldy sands, and with whom he 
spent vacation times in the Highlands, now began 
to enjoy society more and to hate "schoolmas- 
tering" worse. More than this, the ministry, 
never attractive to him, now seemed intolerable, 
and though he had hitherto complied with the 
non-resident requirement of a sermon a year, 
delivered at the university, and had but two years 
to wait for ordination, he applied for his father's 
consent, reluctantly but silently granted, and in 
1818 resigned at Kirkcaldy, cancelled his registra- 
tion as a divinity student by suffering it to lapse, 
and with £90, the savings of four years, began the 
study of law. 

Irving, who resigned his Kirkcaldy position at 
the same time, soon had a call to Glasgow as an 
assistant of the renowned Dr. Chalmers, but as for 
Carlyle he "was poor, unpopular, unknown, . . . 
proud, shy, at once so insignificant looking, and 
so grim and sorrowful." He settled in rooms at 
Edinburgh again, and "once more the Ecclefechan 
carrier brought up the weekly or monthly supplies 
of oatmeal cakes and butter." Carlyle, in these 
years, is sincerely to be pitied. If it had been 
possible for some publisher to recognize his talent 
and to put him at work, even in a humble way, he 
might have been saved years of poignant distress, 
and might have escaped the severe attacks of 
mental as well as bodily dyspepsia, from which he 



16 INTRODUCTION 

suffered all his life. We cannot say. Young 
people of mettle always struggle before they settle 
into the harness of life, and it may he that this 
mental unrest and hovering over the brink of de- 
spair were necessary before his mind could break its 
bonds and utter its message to the world. At all 
events, he secured a private pupil now and again 
at two guineas a month ; he found some employ- 
ment as a writer of articles for Brewster's Ency- 
clopcedia, and, all in all, with the aid from home, 
got on without using his £90. With the solace of 
summers at Mainhill and an occasional stay and a 
tramp with Irving at Glasgow, he fancied at times 
he might like the law, but even in his most cheer- 
ful letters one can see that he was fiercely at war 
with life and faint at heart for fear of being 
ultimately worsted in the conflict. Finally, the 
outlook brightened. Some recognition came to 
him by way of his encyclopaedia articles ; he got on 
a footing which justified correspondence with 
publishers; law was abandoned. Brewster gave 
him a check one day for fifteen guineas. He was 
able to send his father a pair of spectacles and his 
mother a golden guinea. Heartened by this up- 
ward fortune, he could ask himself, "What art thou 
afraid of? Wherefore like a coward dost thou for- 
ever pip and whimper and go cowering and trem- 
bling? . . . Ever from that time the temper of my 
misery was changed ; not fear or whining sorrow was 
it, but indignation and grim, fire-eyed defiance." 



CARLYLE 17 

At twenty-six, then, the victory was practically 
won. Carlyle was to be a man of letters. He was 
well versed in French literature; in German he 
was doubtless the best read man of Great Britain. 
Another year, and Irving, who had gone from 
Glasgow to London, put him in the way of tutoring 
two young men by the name of Buller, whose par- 
ents removed to Edinburgh that their sons might 
attend the university. This arrangement yielded 
£200 a year. Carlyle had, moreover, all the liter- 
ary work by way of encyclopaedia and magazine 
articles he could find time to do, and thereafter, 
though never in affluent circumstances, financial 
considerations do not appear to have given him 
legitimate cause for distress. 

Four crowded years now passed rapidly. Carlyle 
tutored, translated Legendre, sent his mother a 
new bonnet, helped his father with money for the 
farm, assisted his brother John at the medical 
school, walked the sands of the Firth, climbed 
Arthur's Seat, visited Miss Welsh, of whom more 
hereafter, wrote a life of Schiller for the London 
Magazine, parted company with the Bullers most 
amicably, and returned to Mainhill. Here he 
translated Wilhelm Meister, and arranged for its 
publication at a compensation of £180 for the first 
edition and £250 for the second. Correspondence 
with Goethe followed. Carlyle then visited London. 
He saw Irving, called on various publishers, and 
met the literary celebrities of the day. His rever- 



18 INTRODUCTION 

ence for literary people received a shock, he revised 
his estimates, and effaced several lights from his 
literary firmament or reduced them to stars of lesser 
magnitude. He terrified the simple-hearted folk 
at Mainhill by venturing across the Channel, even 
to Paris, but returning safe, rented the small farm 
of Hoddam Hill, enjoyed its quiet, lost some money 
in its management, and finally * 'flitted" with his 
father and the whole family to a larger farm and 
house called Scotsbrig, near Ecclefechan. Then 
followed four years of intense and now well-directed 
effort, for the details of which the student is 
referred to Fronde's admirable Life of Carlyle. 

One cannot keep up courage in an intellectual 
life without friends. They need not be many, but 
they must be staunch. Irving was a firm friend 
to Carlyle, and he was the means of introducing 
him to another. Before taking a school at Kirk- 
caldy, Irving had taught at Haddington, the birth- 
place of John Knox, less than twenty miles east of 
Edinburgh. Here he became much interested in 
Jane Baillie Welsh, a young girl of beautiful per- 
son and unusual intellectual quickness, whose 
studies he continued to direct until he went to 
Glasgow. During the summer of 1821, returning 
to Edinburgh for a visit, as was his wont, he took 
Carlyle from his supposed law studies, and together 
they walked out to Haddington, taking the short 
cuts and byways, talking as they went. Here Car- 
lyle met Miss Welsh, who united with Irving in 



CARLYLE 19 

admiration of his vigorous understanding and racy 
speech, while Carlyle no less admired her vivacity 
and literary appreciation. Under these circum- 
stances, there was little difficulty in arranging that 
he should direct her reading. A fast friendship 
ensued. Carlyle had no hope of aspiring to one of 
her high social position, and she had no thought of 
marrying a penniless peasant's son in a single lodg- 
ing, but friends they were, and during his years of 
greatest struggle, she was his literary confidante, 
never doubting his ultimate success. Society at 
her feet she cared not a rap for ; the young man of 
genius, of flawless private life, struggling out of 
obscurity, she did care for ; his future became the 
sole object of her solicitude ; she entered into his 
plans with energy and hopefulness, and even visited 
the Carlyle home at Mainhill. 

Finally, after many misgivings and prudential 
hesitatings, they decided to face the world together. 
Miss Welsh was the daughter of an eminent sur- 
geon, who at his death had left his property (the 
house at Haddington, some investments and a 
farm near Dumfries) to his only daughter for the 
support of herself and her mother; now, on her 
marriage to Carlyle, with a mixture of character- 
istic pride and generosity, she turned all the prop- 
erty over to her mother. Carlyle and Miss Welsh 
were married in October, 1826, and began house- 
keeping the same day in a small dwelling at Comely 
Bank, in the suburbs of Edinburgh. The home 



20 INTRODUCTION 

was comfortably furnished from Haddington. Mrs. 
Carlyle had a faculty for entertaining little parties, 
her social standing was unquestioned, and the 
literary people of Edinburgh were pleased to be her 
guests. Among these visitors at Comely Bank 
came one who, after Irving and Jane Welsh, must 
be counted Carlyle 's closest friend, no less a person 
than the brilliant Francis Jeffrey, editor of the 
Edinburgh Review. The Edinburgh Revieio was 
started in 1802 by a coterie of brilliant young men 
who were dissatisfied with current criticism as ema- 
nating from those who had books to sell. Jeffrey 
was the first editor-in-chief. Contributors were 
paid liberally, and from the first the new quarterly 
took high standing for wit and ability. It was an 
honor to be a contributor, and quite the proper 
thing to be a subscriber. Under the influence of 
this new friendship that never failed, Carlyle set 
fire to a novel he could not have completed, and 
became a contributor to this, the most influential 
quarterly of the day. Carlyle's first article was 
creditable; his second, on the State of German 
Literature, attracted the attention of the best 
minds in Europe. 

Carlyle, however, was dissatisfied with city life. 
He wanted undisturbed quiet for his hours of writ- 
ing, and he pined for the solitude of the moors for 
his hours of thinking. Mrs. Carlyle was a deli- 
cate, refined woman, accustomed to the town 
and to intelligent society, yet she yielded out 



CARLYLE 21 

of regard to her husband and his future. The 
way seemed to open naturally. Mrs. Welsh, 
Jane's mother, had not been successful in obtain- 
ing a thrifty tenant for Craigenputtock, the Dum- 
frieshire farm, so Alexander Carlyle, a brother 
who had not succeeded particularly well with 
Carlyle 's experiment at Hoddam Hill, was placed 
in charge of Craigenputtock. The farm-house 
was enlarged and put in repair ; six teams drew the 
household stuff from Edinburgh. Mrs. Carlyle 
turned her back on the comforts she had been 
accustomed to, and for seven years the Carlyles 
took up their home at the farmstead of Craigenput- 
tock, on the bleak hills seventeen miles from Dum- 
fries and the postoffice. Here Jeffrey came to see 
them, here our American Emerson came for the 
night's visit later recorded in English Traits, and 
here Carlyle, not yet perfectly happy, made the 
following entry in his diary: "Finished a paper on 
Burns, September 16, 1828, at this Devil's Den, 
Craigenputtock. " 

We have followed Carlyle thus minutely from 
Ecclefechan to Craigenputtock to show that his 
final success — mastery is the better word — was 
achieved by working for it. Carlyle inherited a 
capacious, constructive mind and power of expres- 
sion, but if reading and studying and digging at 
books, with prolonged and agonizing thinking, 
ever brought a mind to its full development, it did 
in him. And, though many other pieces of work 



22 INTRODUCTION 

were done at Craigenputtock, we do not at this 
time need the details, however interesting, of Car- 
lyle's later life there, nor, indeed, anything but the 
barest record of the life that followed. After writ- 
ing Sartor Resartus, he removed in 1834 to Lon- 
don to secure library facilities. Mrs. Carlyle resumed 
her tea-parties, which became one of the features 
of literary London, and guarded her husband's 
study for thirty-two years while he scolded and 
fumed and wrote his French Revolution, his 
Heroes and Hero Worship, Past and Present, Life 
and Letters of Oliver Cromwell, Life of Sterling, 
and Life of Frederick the Great, his writings ex- 
tending in all to thirty volumes. 

In 1866 he was elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh 
University, whither he journeyed and where, after 
delivering an address of noble power, he left the 
hall amid the tumultuous applause of the body of 
students, no doubt the most gratifying and fit 
recognition he had ever received. But before he 
could rejoin his wife in London, that high-minded 
and gifted woman, in the midst of her gladness 
for his new honor, had passed away. Carlyle lived 
another fifteen years to mourn her loss, but his 
spirit was broken, his pen was no longer in service. 
In 1881, he ended a life, stern, impetuous, irri- 
table, but, "in the weightier matters of the law, 
without speck or flaw. From his earliest years, in 
the home at Ecclefechan, at school, at college, we 
see invariably the same innocence of heart and 



BURNS 23 

uprightness and integrity of action. As a child, 
as a boy, as a man, he had been true in word, and 
honest and just in deed." By his own request, 
made with true Scottish loyalty, his remains were 
not deposited in Westminster Abbey, but in the 
churchyard of Ecclefechan. Perhaps no man has 
exercised a greater influence on the thought of this 
century. 

BURNS 

It is to be wished that the testimony to Carlyle's 
private character could be given to Burns 's as well. 
A recent critic says that Burns is good enough as 
he is, but, unfortunately, it is not so, for in the 
poet's unrestrained hours, even of his later years, 
he committed acts which to this day cause his 
admirers to hang their heads and to wish that he 
had possessed some strong, unselfish friend to hold 
him to the ways of his forefathers. 

Like Carlyle, Burns was well born, none better. 
His father and his mother were Lowland peas- 
ants, hardworking, frugal, and in straitened cir- 
cumstances, but with an indigenous culture far 
above the vulgarity of life, a culture which one 
comes upon throughout Anglo- Saxondom, and 
which, under favorable circumstances, has reached 
its highest development in the hills of New Eng- 
land. Eobert Burns was born January 25, 1759, 
in a straw -thatched cottage, a half hour's walk 
out of Ayr, to a father and a mother belonging to 



24 INTRODUCTION 

that better peasant element which on both sides of 
the Atlantic has forced the world to hold the term, 
"common people," in respect. His father was a 
gardener, tilling a few acres of his own but also 
working for wages. In the Cotter's Saturday 
Night Burns gives a picture of his father with "his 
spades, his mattocks, and his hoes," and of his 
mother, * 'wi' her needles and her shears. ' ' Family 
circumstances were such that Eobert, a strong boy, 
large of his age, was needed in the small tasks of 
tillage, but in one way he was fortunate. His 
mother had an extraordinary store of folk-lore 
songs and ballads, and his father made an effort to 
surround his children with good reading and to 
entertain them with instructive conversation 
Schooling, moveover, was not neglected altogether. 
The lad was started at school when five years of 
age, and had an occasional term of prized instruc- 
tion until he was a youth grown. 

When Burns was seven years old, his father 
removed to the farm of Mt. Oliphant. At fifteen, 
Robert was the principal breadwinner of the family ; 
in 1773, he composed his first song, Handsome 
Nell,m honor of the village blacksmith's daughter. 
In 1777 the family removed to Lochlea, an unprof- 
itable farm in the parish of Tarbolton. In 1778 
Burns was fortunate enough to secure a summer 
term of schooling at Kirkoswald, where it is said he 
ate his meals with Fergusson's poems in one hand 
and his spoon in the other. Returning to the 



BURNS 25 

farm, he composed Poor Mailie's Elegy, Winter, 
and other early pieces, under an awakened ambi- 
tion to become a poet of the people, or, as he loved 
to put it, a Scottish bard. Then in casting about 
for some means of bettering his own circumstances 
and of helping the family, Burns worked for some 
months in a kind of partnership at the flaxdresser's 
trade in Irvine; but, during a New Year's carousal, 
the shop took fire and burned to the ground. 
Burns returned to Lochlea without a penny and 
much the worse in morals. Three years later, in 
1784, his father died, and Burns, with his brother 
Gilbert, took the family to their fourth home, the 
farm of Mossgiel, in Mauchline. 

His best work, indeed, most of his good work, 
was done here. It will be interesting to note that the 
body of the poems mentioned by Carlyle (pp. 67-78) 
were written during the two or three short years at 
Mossgiel, before Burns had much idea of his own 
value. Of Burns at Mossgiel, we have an interest- 
ing account. He was now twenty -six years old, and 
labored on the farm with his brother, carrying a 
book about in his pocket during the day, reading as 
he rested against the plough, or, as the mood was 
on him, thinking out his theme. At night he 
climbed to his attic room, where he had contrived 
a rude table, and committed his thoughts to paper 
before he went to rest His subjects afford variety 
enough, and happily none are from books. Some 
old tune, or some border ballad running in his 



26 INTRODUCTION 

mind, some church fracas, the death of an old 
neighbor, or even the loss of his pet sheep, brought 
forth a poem. He wrote ballads, epistles, 
epitaphs, satires, dedications. He attacked the 
clergy and praised the devil, but never belittled 
religion. He wrote a poem, it has been cleverly 
said, to each lass in the parish, and, finally, in 
ecstasy, wrote a poem to them collectively. He 
wrote of winter, spring, and summer, of rivers, 
braes, and uplands. Dreams, regret, and despond- 
ency called forth expression. A mouse, a daisy, a 
suet pudding, a favorite mare, a calf, the tooth- 
ache, a stormy night, and even a louse, are made 
the subjects of poems which must be read to be 
appreciated. They are a revelation, and justify 
Carlyle's dictum that genius can never have far to 
seek for a subject. 

Burns 's poems were composed for a local audi- 
ence, often for a single eye, or, at most, for a local 
paper. Whatever hope he may have had of future 
distinction, he took no step to secure outside recog- 
nition, and, were the truth known, he was only too 
proud of the rip-roaring, thigh-slapping applause 
of the numerous convivial gatherings in which he 
was easily first. 

Evidently his heart was not in farming. Numer- 
ous amatory experiences which mar this as well as 
other periods of his life, and constantly increasing 
indebtedness, involved him in embarrassments, and 
led to his casting about for means to leave the 



BURNS 27 

country. After some thought and not a little 
encouragement from acquaintances, Burns decided 
to raise money by publishing a small volume of his 
poems at Kilmarnock. This was before enterprise 
had concentrated so largely in the cities, and, to 
his surprise as well as relief, the edition sold so 
well as to clear off his obligations and enable him 
to arrange for his departure to the plantations of 
Jamaica. He had, in fact, sent his box to Green- 
ock, at that time the sailing port of Glasgow, and 
was himself on the way thither when a letter from 
Dr. Blacklock of Edinburgh came into his hands, 
expressing the high favor with which his Kilmar- 
nock volume had been received. Burns at once 
changed his mind. He resolved to go to Edin- 
burgh to seek an appointment in the excise, and to 
canvass the desirability of a new edition of his 
poems. 

His presence in Edinburgh created a f urqre. The 
gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt subscribed in 
advance for a hundred copies of his poems, and 
the newly-discovered ploughman poet was the lion 
of the day. For the time Burns felt rich ; he had been 
lionized by the society of the capital city of Scot- 
land, and he had money in his pocket. He now 
made a long-desired tour of the border between 
England and Scotland, so rich in traditions of 
minstrelsy. Returning to Mossgiel, he again took 
a trip, this time into the Highlands. A consider- 
able sum of money, which came in from the sale of 



28 INTRODUCTION 

his Edinburgh edition, he generously shared with 
his brother and the rest of the family. In 1788, he 
obtained the desired post in the excise, formally 
married Jean Armour, by whom he had already 
had two children under an irregular but morally 
binding form of marriage, and rented Ellisland, 
near Dumfries. But Burns was spoiled. His farm 
ran behind under hired help, he wasted time among 
discreditable companions, and had it not been for 
the £60 derived annually from his exciseship, his 
family would have been in need. To Mary in 
Heaven, Auld Lancf Syne, and Tain O'Shanter 
were composed at Ellisland, but, on the whole, 
Burns never recovered from the glimpses he 
had of "high life" in Edinburgh. In 1790, he 
removed with his family to Dumfries, living hence- 
forth on his income as an officer and some small 
return from his poems. At Dumfries, he fell into 
disrepute, we cannot say undeservedly, his self- 
respect faded away, and he was but the shadow of 
what he might have been when, in 1796, he died. 
Robert Burns was a sad bundle of contradictions. 
Education and independence he sacrificed freely to 
keep father and mother above want — Carlyle himself 
had no deeper respect for the piety and upright- 
ness of his parents — yet Burns rejected their most 
serious admonitions. No poet before or since has 
surpassed Burns in seeing the true dignity of pro- 
ductive labor ; yet work irked him, and he allowed 
himself in his letters to speak contemptuously of 



BURNS 29 

miry furrows and offensive barnyard surroundings. 
None saw more keenly the injustice of rank and 
the emptiness of title; yet he permitted lack of 
social distinction to embitter his existence. A man 
could hardly have been more desirous for sympathy 
and respect; certainly no one ever threw away 
opportunity with a more prodigal hand. 

The lives of Burns and Carlyle afford perfect 
contrast. Carlyle 'a parents seem to have set him 
apart for study from his earliest childhood. 
Burns 's parents did what they could, but depended 
upon the poet's labor beyond the period when he 
ought to have had a home and a family of his own. 
Carlyle 'a education was as thorough as Scotland 
could offer ; the muse found Burns literally at the 
tail of a plough. Carlyle was cautious and thrifty; 
Burns was reckless and prodigal. In their methods 
of work there is the aame difference. Carlyle 
wasted no moments; he blocked out his subject, 
and sat down to it as methodically as ever Roman 
laid siege to a city. Burns assumed no responsi- 
bility, cared not a straw how his subject might come, 
but when a thought took shape in his mind wrote 
it off. Give Carlyle a subject, a library, his meals 
and seclusion, and he would heat and forge and 
weld until he had his thought in appropriate form 
for presentation. Let Burns alone, make no effort 
to direct him, let him move among men and 
among the fields until something casually stirred 
him, and he would sink into the proper mood, — and 



30 INTRODUCTION 

then a poem. Each had the proper training for 
his own kind of composition, and each in his own 
sphere is among the few. Carlyle, however, is 
constructive; Burns is creative. Carlyle's essay is 
a search for value; in Burns 's poems may be found 
the treasure. 

COMMENTS ON THE ESSAY 

To derive full benefit from Carlyle's essay on 
Burns, it should be read repeatedly. The first 
reading should be off-hand and free, without note 
or explanation. It would be well to copy the fash- 
ion of Lowell, who was fond of reading alone 
under some large willows near his home, for the 
serious thoughtf ulness and quiet uplift that are the 
true reader's guests steal in only when they are sure 
of their host to themselves. This first time one 
should read simply because he is interested. Then, 
for class purposes, the essay should be read with 
dictionary and cyclopaedia of names at hand. 
Words must be weighed, references looked up, and 
allusions made clear. While one should cultivate 
a rangy method of getting through a book, a 
reader who makes any pretension to exact informa- 
tion owes it to himself to do a given amount of 
close verbal reading something after the fashion of 
translating a foreign text. 

This essay, like any other, may also be regarded 
from more than one point of view, which it were 
well, perhaps, to distinguish carefully. 



COMMENTS ON THE ESSAY 31 

a. AS AN" ILLUSTRATION OF CARLYLE'S STYLE. 

Carlyle's writings are difficult to classify. Heroes 
and Hero Worship, Cromwell, Frederick the Great, 
and the French Revolution are in a way historical, 
yet they are not primarily history. Carlyle's fame 
is not that of an historian. His theory of history 
and of the hero at the helm is founded on a dis- 
trust of the ability of the common people to work 
out their own affairs. His discussions of questions 
of the day in Chartism and Past and Present, 
share with the writings of Euskin the delusion that 
leaders will arise among the well-to-do who shall 
devote themselves to the interests of the masses, 
the people on the other hand becoming grateful 
and, above all, obedient. The nineteenth century 
idea of government emanating from the people and 
exercised by themselves in their own interests, he 
seems unable to disassociate from violence, subver- 
sion and lawless disobedience. Historians will go 
to Carlyle for lurid descriptions and minute details, 
but not for authentic statement, nor for the theory 
of history. Political economists and teachers of 
social science will draw on Carlyle for scathing 
indictments of evil, but he is utterly impracticable; 
his ideas of political reform have had little accept- 
ance. It is as a criticism of life, as an appeal to 
conscience that his political writings have so pow- 
erfully influenced, not indeed popular legislation 
directly, but personal conduct. They rank pri- 
marily as contributions to literature, and Carlyle's 



32 INTRODUCTION 

standing is that of a man of letters. It is just and 
proper, therefore, that a study of Carlyle should 
be based on his Miscellanies or Essays, which 
include his best literary work. 

First to attract the attention of a student is 
Carlyle 's peculiar choice and forceful use of words. 
The vocabulary used by the family at Ecclefechan, 
a vocabulary from which he never departed, was a 
remarkably apt one, drawn from two unsurpassed 
sources, the dialect of the Lowlands and King 
James's Translation. To this Carlyle added, by 
dint of prodigious reading, almost the entire 
vocabulary known to metaphysics, theology, his- 
tory, biography, and polite literature. Familiarity 
with German and French and the ancient lan- 
guages rendered him superior to lexicons and made 
him an authority unto himself. He not only felt 
competent, but was competent to use any word that 
suited his meaning. Fire-eyed, perhaps borrowed 
from Shakspere, is a favorite word. Many unusual 
words, such as poet-soul and ale-vapors, he probably 
coined on the spot, without giving the origin of 
the words a second thought, provided they met his 
needs. One has only to choose a paragraph at ran- 
dom and attempt to substitute synonyms to become 
impressed with the fitness of Carlyle 's vocabulary. 

In some other respects one feels that he might 
have improved, for Carlyle is hard to understand. 
His Burns was written under the most favorable 
circumstances, and is considered one of his clearest 



COMMENTS ON THE ESSAY 33 

and best pieces of writing. Yet it is by no means 
easy to follow his thought. He pays little atten- 
tion to the reader. The thought is there; if the 
reader cannot get it, let him qualify. Carlyle's 
allusions are frequent and pertinent but undis- 
criminating, and at times certainly unduly recon- 
dite. An author who shreds into his writings bits 
of fact or information gathered up in his walks and 
conversation, or more probably unearthed from old 
volumes that may not be opened again for genera- 
tions, if ever, is not likely to be popular. In read- 
ing this essay, for instance, it is easy to trace many 
phrases and words to their source in border history, 
in the Scriptures, or in Shakspere, but the aver- 
age reader can hardly realize how full every line is 
of hidden fire. With here a word from a ballad, 
and there a word from Lamentations, called up by 
the relationship of the ballad to Burns 's poem or 
by a train of reflection upon the contrasting char- 
acters of the Scottish bard and the Hebrew 
prophet, it would be impossible to determine what 
association of ideas moulded Carlyle's phraseology, 
unless one were to pass through his experiences. 
The most diligent student, even by giving a life- 
time to the study of Lowland life, Scottish poetry 
and Carlyle's literary antecedents, would be unable 
to read out of this essay all that the author wrote 
into it. There is all the more need, therefore, for 
a careful study of the points it is possible to clear 
up. 



34 INTRODUCTION 

An attempt to bring the essay as a whole, or by 
paragraphs, or even sentence by sentence, within 
the rules of modern composition is unavailing. 
It would not be easy to give a reason for the occur- 
rence of paragraphs in their present order ; entire 
groups of paragraphs might be shifted to another 
position; it is difficult to bring the essay within 
any reasonable kind of topical analysis. Yet it 
would be more difficult to suggest an arrange- 
ment of greater effectiveness. One might as well 
try to rearrange the stones in a wall as to rear- 
range Carlyle's sentences. In matters of punctua- 
tion and capitalization and sentence structure, 
too, Carlyle must be taken as he is. 

Carlyle's whole life was a protest against thinking 
as other people pretend to think, and against doing 
as other people do. To be sure, he had bound- 
less sympathy and coveted appreciation. In his 
correspondence with Goethe, and possibly in some 
of his letters to Emerson, he shows a desire to 
propitiate, to be pleasant ; but ordinarily he makes 
no effort to write in an acceptable, not to say 
pleasing, manner. If Carlyle did not care to please, 
he did care to be believed. Criticism of his style, 
retort for his sharp sayings, personal attack, any 
amount of vituperation, might fall on his armored 
sides and he would lie at anchor grim and silent ; 
but doubt his sincerity, venture to question his colors 
and he would train his guns upon you instantly. 
Had Carlyle known that this essay would some day 



COMMENTS ON THE ESSAY 35 

be used for class purposes, his only concern would 
have been to have students find and accept his 
thought. 

Carlyle himself says that composition was a 
slow and even painful task. As a lad he had 
seen his industrious father choose stones and 
true them with a hammer, and lift them into 
place and level them with smaller pieces, and 
imbed them all in mortar to build up an honest 
wall. So, as a man, Carlyle chose rugged thoughts, 
shaped and fitted them and laid them in a wealth 
of allusions and supporting facts to build up an 
honest essay; and he has succeeded. We may, 
indeed, pick out a bit of mortar here and point out 
a want of harmony in the granitic colors there, but 
this essay is still a fitting monument to its builder, 
a simple, enduring piece of workmanship, the very 
materialization of his own rules for the honest 
craftsman, be he in literature or any other honor- 
able walk in life. "No slop work ever dropped 
from his pen. He never wrote down a word which 
he had not weighed, nor a sentence which he had 
not assured himself contained a truth." No better 
exemplification of his literary method can be 
chosen than his paper on Burns. 

b. AS A CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF BURNS. 

It was no doubt the author's intention to say a 
conclusive word about Burns. He had a feeling 
that, while noise enough had been made over 
Burns, the popular applause was indis criminating 



36 INTRODUCTION 

and not based upon a genuine perception of merit. 
Carlyle was peculiarly well fitted to write on this 
subject. Froude says, "It is one of the very best 
of his essays, and was composed with an evidently 
very peculiar interest, because the outward circum- 
stances of Burns's life, his origin, his early sur- 
roundings, his situation as a man of genius born in 
a farmhouse not many miles distant, among the 
same people and the same associations as were so 
familiar to himself, could not fail to make him 
think often of himself while he was writing about 
his countryman." Carlyle 's estimate has been very 
generally accepted, and future critics can hardly re- 
verse his judgment. They will have greater length 
of perspective, but this advantage will be offset by 
want of sympathy. They cannot be a part of what 
Burns and Carlyle were, for the land of Burns, the 
land of Carlyle, is fast becoming a part of the out- 
side world. Local culture, long indigenous, is 
merging into cosmopolitanism. Stevenson and 
Barrie and Watson are indeed worthy weavers of the 
Scottish plaid, but they are not Carlyle and Burns. 
If the essay be studied for the light it throws on 
Burns and for a criticism of his poetry, a good life 
of Burns should be read first, and Burns's more 
important poems should be made familiar. For 
a farther contribution in Carlyle's best vein, the 
student should read a few pages of Burns, the 
Hero as a Man of Letters, in Heroes and Hero 
Worship. 



COMMENTS ON THE ESSAY 37 

C. AS A CONTRIBUTION TO THE THEORY OF LIT- 
ERATURE. Carlyle's theory of literature, his enun- 
ciation of the rules which should govern literary 
utterance and in accordance with which judgment 
should be passed — that is to say, his ideas of literary 
criticism — are entirely subordinate in the plan of the 
essay. They are given briefly in a few paragraphs, 
only to justify the reviewer's dogmas and to support 
his critique of Burns 's poetry and life. When an 
author considers every word he writes as important, 
it is unlikely that he knows when he says his best 
things, but Carlyle's theory of literature, first 
clearly enunciated in this essay, is his surest claim 
to fame. Eeference has been made to the diffi- 
culty of tracing Carlyle's allusions, but there is no 
difficulty in tracing his influence. Once on the alert, 
it is astonishingly easy to note the indebtedness of 
modern criticism to him. Of American writers 
we may mention Emerson and Lowell and Whipple 
and Stedman as freely acknowledging his influence. 
In England, Matthew Arnold extended and applied 
the ideas of Carlyle's essay. It holds a fundamental 
piece of literary criticism which has underlain and 
stimulated the literary activity of the Victorian age. 
Poets, novelists and critics have squared their 
writings or sealed their verdicts, consciously or 
unconsciously, in accordance with the message sent 
by that lone man with the beetling brow down from 
the moors of Craigenputtock to the Edinburgh 
Review. Carlyle's ideas of what literature should 



38 INTRODUCTION 

be and, consequently, by what standard it should 
be judged, are stated so clearly that it would be 
unfair to the student to summarize them here 
instead of permitting him to gather and arrange 
them for himself. 

One other point should be noticed, for it marks 
the beginning of better things in literary criticism. 
Carlyle was a man of spotless integrity. His life 
was trying to his friends, but he laid it down with- 
out a blot. He hated the way of the transgressor 
with a hatred akin to savagery. Yet in this essay, 
overlooking Burns 's slips and wrong-doing, he 
throws over him the mantle of charity, takes him 
by the hand, calls him countryman, and says to the 
world : Behold, here is a Man, his works do speak 
for him. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 39 

Even with judicious notes at hand not a little work 
in a library is desirable. For tributes to Burns the 
poems of Whittier, Lowell and Wordsworth should be* 
put under contribution. Encyclopaedia articles on 
Burns and Carlyle should be consulted. Frequent 
references to a large dictionary and the Century Cyclo- 
pcedia of Names are almost indispensable. For the 
literary conditions of the times of Carlyle and Burns, 
consult Welsh's Development of English Literature. 
The recent edition of Burns's Poems, by Andrew Lang, 
since it is inexpensive and carefully done, is probably 
the most appropriate edition for a school library. 

The following additional reference books are care- 
fully selected as those most likely to repay study. 

Carlyle 

Thomas Carlyle, Froude. 

Reminiscences, Carlyle. 

Correspondence, Carlyle-Emerson. 

Correspondence, Carlyle-Goethe. 

Letters and Memorials, Carlyle, Jane Welsh. 

Critical Miscellanies, Morley. 

Literary Essays, Vol. II., Lowell. 

Emerson (Discourses in America), Arnold. 

English Traits, Emerson. 

Thomas Carlyle (English Men of Letters Series), 

Nichol. 
Fresh Fields, Burroughs. 
Corrected Impressions, Saintsbury. 



Burns 



Life and Works of Robert Burns, Chambers. 
The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, Lang. 
Life of Burns (Great Writers Series), Blackie. 
History of English Literature, Taine. 
Familiar Studies of Men and Books, Stevenson. 
letters (Camelot Classics), Burns. 
The Study of Poetry (Essays in Criticism), Arnold. 
Heroes and Hero Worship, Carlyle. 
Miscellanies, Emerson. 



40 INTRODUCTION 

POEMS OF BUENS NAMED IN THE ESSAY 

1783 Poor Mailie's Elegy. 

Epistle to William Simpson. 

The Holy Fair. 

Halloween. 

To a Mouse. 

The Jolly Beggars. A Cantata. 

The Cotter's Saturday Night. 

Address to the Deil. 

Scotch Drink. 



1785-^ 



1786 <J 



The Auld Farmer's New- Year-Morning Saluta- 
tion to his Auld Mare, Maggie. 

To a Mountain Daisy. 

The Brigs of Ayr. 
| Farewell to the Banks of Ayr. 
L A Winter Night. 

1787 Epistle to Mrs. Scott of Wauchope House. 

1788 M'Pherson's Farewell. 
Ode— Sacred to the Memory of Mrs. Oswald of 

Auchencruive. 

1789 \ The Wounded Hare. 

1 Willie Brew'd a Peck o' Maut. 
L To Mary in Heaven. 

1 7Q0 i ^ e »y on Captain Matthew Henderson. 
( Tarn O'Shanter : A Tale. 

{Duncan Gray. 
Open the Door to Me, oh. 
Bruce's Address at Bannockburn. 



CARLYLE'S ESSAY ON 
BURNS 



This essay first appeared as a leading- article, or perhaps 
better, as a literary criticism, in the Edinburgh Review for 
December, 1828, under the following heading : 
Art. I. The Life of Robert Burns. 
By J. G. Lockhart, LL.B., Edinburgh, 1828. 

Eleven years later Carlyle collected his papers from the 
pages of several periodicals, and republished them. He 
was never fond of long titles and this essay he named with 
a single luminous word Burns. While professedly writing 
a book review it is interesting to note that Carlyle refers 
to Lockhart in but three places ; in the first sentence of the 
second paragraph, in the fourth paragraph, and in the two 
quotations on pages 99 and 110. 



BUBNS 

In the modern arrangements of society, it is no 
uncommon thing that a man of genius must, like 
Butler, "ask for bread and receive a stone;" for, 
in spite of our grand maxim of supply and demand, 

5 it is by no means the highest excellence that men 
are most forward to recognize. The inventor of a 
spinning- jenny is pretty sure of his reward in his 
own day ; but the writer of a true poem, like the 
apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the 

10 contrary. We do not know whether it is not an 
aggravation of the injustice, that there is generally 
a posthumous retribution. Robert Burns, in the 
course of Nature, might yet have been living; but 
his short life was spent in toil and penury ; and he 

15 died, in the prime of his manhood, miserable and 
neglected: and yet already a brave mausoleum 
shines over his dust, and more than one splendid 
monument has been reared in other places to his 
fame ; the street where he languished in poverty is 

20 called by his name ; the highest personages in our 
literature have been proud to appear as his com- 
mentators and admirers; and here is the sixth 
narrative of his Life that has been given to the 
world ! 

43 



* 



44 CARLYLE'S 

Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize for 
this new attempt on such a subject : but his read- 
ers, we believe, will readily acquit him; or, at 
worst, will censure only the performance of his task, 
not the choice of it. The character of Burns, 5 
indeed, is a theme that cannot easily become either 
trite or exhausted ; and will probably gain rather 
than lose in its dimensions by the distance to 
which it is removed by Time. No man, it has 
been said, is a hero to his valet ; and this is prob- 10 
ably true ; but the fault is at least as likely to be 
the valet's as the hero's. Tor it is certain that to 
the vulgar eye few things are wonderful that are 
not distant. It is difficult for men to believe that 
the man, the mere man whom they see, nay, per- is 
haps painfully feel, toiling at their side through the 
poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer 
clay than themselves. Suppose that some dining 
acquaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neighbour 
of John a Combe's, had snatched an hour or two 20 
from the preservation of his game, and written us 
a Life of Shakspeare ! What dissertations should 
we not have had, — not on Hamlet and The Tempest, 
but on the wool-trade, and deer -stealing, and the 
libel and vagrant laws; and how the Poacher 25 
became a Player; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. 
John had Christian bowels, and did not push 
him to extremities! In like manner, we believe, 
with respect to Burns, that till the companions of 
his pilgrimage, the Honorable Excise Commission- 30 



BURNS 45 

ers, and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, 
and the Dumfries Aristocracy, and all the Squires 
and Earls, equally with the Ayr Writers, and the 
New and Old Light Clergy, whom he had to do 

5 with, shall have become invisible in the darkness 
of the Past, or visible only by light borrowed from 
his juxtaposition, it will be difficult to measure 
him by any true standard, or to estimate what he 
really was and did, in the eighteenth century, for 

10 his country and the world. It will be difficult, we 
say ; but still a fair problem for literary historians ; 
and repeated attempts will give us repeated 
approximations. 

His former Biographers have done something, no 

15 doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. 
Dr. Currie and Mr. Walker, the principal of these 
writers, have both, we think, mistaken one essen- 
tially important thing: Their own and the world's 
true relation to their author, and the style in which 

20 it became such men to think and to speak of such 
a man. Dr. Currie loved the poet truly ; more per- 
haps than he avowed to his readers, or even to 
himself ; yet he everywhere introduces him with a 
certain patronizing, apologetic air ; as if the polite 

25 public might think it strange and half unwarrant- 
able that he, a man of science, a scholar and 
gentleman, should do such honour to a rustic. In all 
this, however, we readily admit that his fault was 
not want of love, but weakness of faith; and 

30 regret that the first and kindest of all our poet's 



46 CARLYLES 

biographers should not have seen farther, or believed 
more boldly what he saw. Mr. Walker offends 
more deeply in the same kind : and both err alike 
in presenting us with a detached catalogue of his 
several supposed attributes, virtues and vices, 5 
instead of a delineation of the resulting character 
as a living unity. This, however, is not painting a 
portrait; but gauging the length and breadth of 
the several features, and jotting down their dimen- 
sions in arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so 10 
much as that : for we are yet to learn by what arts 
or instruments the mind could be so measured and 
gauged. 

Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided 
both these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as 15 
the high and remarkable man the public voice has 
now pronounced him to be: and in delineating 
him, he has avoided the method of separate gener- 
alities, and rather sought for characteristic inci- 
dents, habits, actions, sayings; in a word, for 20 
aspects which exhibit the whole man, as he looked 
and lived among his fellows. The book accord- 
ingly, with all its deficiencies, gives more insight, 
we think, into the true character of Burns, than 
any prior biography: though, being written on the 25 
very popular and condensed scheme of an article 
for Constable's Miscellany, it has less depth than 
we could have wished and expected from a writer 
of such power ; and contains rather more, and more 
multifarious quotations than belong of right to an 30 



BURNS 47 

original production. Indeed, Mr. Lockhart's own 
writing is generally so good, so clear, direct, and 
nervous, that we seldom wish to see it making place 
for another man's. However, the spirit of the 
5 work is throughout candid, tolerant, and anxiously 
conciliating ; compliments and praises are liberally 
distributed, on all hands, to great and small; and, 
as Mr. Morris Birkbeck observes of the society in 
the backwoods of America, "the courtesies of 

10 polite life are never lost sight of for a moment." 
But there are better things than these in the vol- 
ume ; and we can safely testify, not only that it is 
easily and pleasantly read a first time, but may even 
be without difficulty read again. 

is Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the 
problem of Burns 's Biography has yet been ade- 
quately solved. We do not allude so much to 
deficiency of facts or documents, — though of these 
we are still every day receiving some fresh acces- 

20 sion, — as to the limited and imperfect application 
of them to the great end of Biography. Our 
notions upon this subject may perhaps appear 
■ extravagant ; but if an individual is really of conse- 
quence enough to have his life and character 

25 recorded for public remembrance, we have always 
been of opinion that the public ought to be made 
acquainted with all the inward springs and relations 
of his character. How did the world and man's 
life, from his particular position, represent them- 

30 selves to his mind? How did coexisting circum- CX 



48 CARLYLE'S 

/ 
\ stances modify him from without; how did he 

modify these from within? ^With what endeavours 
and what efficacy rule over them ; with what resist- 
ance and what suffering sink under them? \ In one 
word, what and how produced was the effect of 5 
society on him ; what and how produced was his 
effect on society? He who should answer these 
questions, in regard to any individual, would, as we , 
believe, furnish a model of perfection in Biography. v- 
Few individuals, indeed, can deserve such a study; 10 
and many lives will be written, and, for the grati- 
fication of innocent curiosity, ought to be written, 
and read and forgotten, which are not in this sense 
biographies. But Burns, if we mistake not, is one 
of these few individuals ; and such a study, at least 15 
with such a result, he has not yet obtained. Our 
own contributions to it, we are aware, can be but 
scanty and feeble ; but we offer them with good- 
will, and trust they may meet with acceptance 
from those they are intended for. 20 

Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy ; 
and was, in that character, entertained by it, in 
the usual fashion, with loud, vague, tumultuous 
wonder, speedily subsiding into censure and neglect ; 
till his early and most mournful death again 25 
awakened an enthusiasm for him, which, especially 
as there was now nothing to be done, and much to 
be spoken, has prolonged itself even to our own 
time. It is true, the "nine days" have long since 



BURNS 40 

elapsed ; and the very continuance of this clamour 
proves that Burns was no vulgar wonder. Accord- 
ingly, even in sober judgments, where, as years 
passed by, he has come to rest more and more 

5 exclusively on his own intrinsic merits, and may 
now be well-nigh shorn of that casual radiance, he 
appears not only as a triie British poet, but as one 
of the most considerable British men of the eight- 
eenth century. Let it not be objected that he did 

10 little. He did much, if we consider where and 
how. If the work performed was small, we must 
remember that he had his very materials to dis- 
cover ; for the metal he worked in lay hid under 
the desert, where no eye but his had guessed its 

15 existence ; and we may almost say that with his own 
hand he had to construct the tools for fashioning 
it. For he found himself in deepest obscurity, sj^ 
without help, without instruction, without model ; 
or with models only of the meanest sort. An 

20 educated man stands, as it were, in the midst of a 
boundless arsenal and magazine, filled with all the 
weapons and engines which man's skill has been 
able to devise from the earliest time; and he 
works, accordingly, with a strength borrowed from 

26 all past ages. How different is his state who 
stands on the outside of that storehouse, and feels 
that its gates must be stormed, or remain forever 
shut against him ! His means are the commonest 
and rudest ; the mere work done is no measure of 

30 his strength. A dwarf behind his steam-engine 






50 CARLYLE'S 

may remove mountains; but no dwarf will hew 
them down with a pickaxe: and he must be a 
Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms. 

It is in this last shape that Burns presents him- 
self. Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had 5 
yet seen, and in a condition the most disadvan- 
tageous, where his mind, if it accomplished aught, 
must accomplish it under the pressure of continual 
bodily toil, nay, of penury and desponding appre- 
hension of the worst evils, and with no furtherance 10 
but such knowledge as dwells in a poor man's hut, 
and the rhymes of a Ferguson or Eamsay for his 
standard of beauty, he sinks not under all these 
impediments: through the fogs and darkness of 
that obscure region, his lynx eye discerns the true 15 
relations of the world and human life ; he grows 
into intellectual strength, and trains himself into 
intellectual expertness. Impelled by the expan- 
sive movement of his own irrjeprssflible soul, he 
struggles forward into the general view ; and with 20 
ln3;U^hty_jnodesty_lays down before us, as the fruit 
of his labour, a gift which Time has now pronounced 
imperishable. [Jdd to all this, that his darksome 
drudging childhood and youth was by far the kind- 
liest era of his whole lif ejj and that he died in his 25 
thirty -seventh year : and then ask, If it be strange 
that his poems are imperfect, and of small extent, 
or that his genius attained no mastery in its art? 

/ Alas, his Sun shone as through a tropical tornado; 

\ and the pale Shadow of Death eclipsed it at noon ! 30 



BURNS 51 

Shrouded in such baleful vapours, the genius of 
Burns was never seen in clear azure splendour, 
enlightening the world: but some beams from it 
did, by fits, pierce through; and it tinted those 

5 clouds with rainbow and orient colours, into a glory 
and stern grandeur, which men silently gazed on 
with wonder and tears ! 

We are anxious not to exaggerate ; for it is expo- 
sition rather than admiration that our readers 

10 require of us here ; and yet to avoid some tendency 
to that side is no easy matter. We love Burns, 
and we pity him ; and love and pity are prone to 
magnify. Criticism, it is sometimes thought, 
should be a cold business ; we are not so sure of 

15 this ; but, at all events, our concern with Burns is 
not exclusively that of critics. True and genial as 
his poetry must appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, 
but as a man, that he interests and affects us. He 
was often advised to write a tragedy : time and 3 

20 means were not lent him for this ; but through 
life he enacted a tragedy, and one of the deepest. 
We question whether the world has since witnessed 
so utterly sad a scene ; whether Napoleon himself, 
left to brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe, and perish on 

25 his rock, < 'amid^h^Jnelan^h£ly_^nain, ,, presented h 
to the reflecting mind such a "spectacle of pity \/ 
and fear," as did this intrinsically nobler, gentler, 
and perhaps greater soul, wasting itself away in a 
hopeksa^strjagglewith base entanglements, which 

30 coiled closer and closer round him, till only death 






52 CARLYLE'S 

[/ opened him an outlet. Conquerors are a class of 
men with whom, for most part, the world could / 
well dispense; nor can the hard intellect, the ^ 
unsympathizing loftiness, and high but selfish / 
enthusiasm of such persons inspire us in general Bv 
with any affection; at best it may excite amaze- / 
ment ; and their fall, like that of a pyramid, will \ 
be beheld with a certain sadness and awe. (T&ut a ^ 
true Poet, a man in whose heart resides some efflu- 
ence of Wisdom, some tone of the "Eternal 10/ 
Melodies," is the most precious gift that can be v 
bestowed on a generation : we see in him a freer, 
purer development of whatever is noblest in our- 
selves; his life is a rich lesson to us; and we mourn 
his death as that of a benefactor who loved and 15 
taught us.y 1 
yj Such a gift xiad Nature, in her bounty, bestowed 1 y 
on us in Kobert Burns ; but with queenlike indiffer- 
ence she cast it from her hand, like a thing of no 
moment ; and it was defaced and torn asunder, as 20 
an idle bauble, before we recognized it. ^To the 
ill-starred Burns was given the power of making 
man's life more venerable, but that of wisely 
guiding his own life was not given. ) Destiny, — for 
so in our ignorance we must speak, — his faults, the 25 
faults of others, proved too hard for him ; and that 
spirit which might have soared could it but have 
walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious faculties 
trodden under foot in the blossom ; and died, we 
may almost say, without ever having lived. And 30 



BURNS 53 

so kind and warm a soul ; so full of inborn riches, 
of love to all living and lifeless things ! < How his 
heart flows out in sympathy over universal Nature ; 
and in her bleakest provinces discerns a beauty and 

5 a meaning \\ The "Daisy" falls not unheeded 
under his ploughshare ; nor the ruined nest of that 
"wee, cowering, timorous beastie, " cast forth, 
after all its provident pains, to "thole the sleety 
dribble and cranreuch cauld." The "hoar visage" 

10 of Winter delights him ; he dwells with a sad and 
oft-returning fondness in these scenes of solemn 
desolation ; but the voice of the tempest becomes 
an anthem to his ears; he loves to walk in the 
sounding woods, for "it raises his thoughts to Him 

is that walketJi on the wings of the wind." A true 
Poet-soul, for it needs but to be struck, and the 
sound it yields will be music! But observe him 
chiefly as he mingles with his brother men. What 
warm, all-comprehending fellow-feeling; what 

20 trustful, boundless love ; what generous exaggera- 
tion of the object loved! His rustic friend, his 
nut-brown maiden, are no longer mean and homely, 
but a hero and a queen, whom he prizes as the 
paragons of Earth. \The rough scenes of Scottish 

25 life, not seen by him in any Arcadian illusion, but 
in the rude contradiction, in the smoke and soil of 
a too harsh reality, are still lovely to him : Poverty 
is indeed his companion, but Love also, and 
Courage; the simple feelings, the worth, the noble- 

30 ness, that dwell under the straw roof, are dear and 



54 CARLYLE'S 

venerable to his heart: and thus over the lowest 
provinces of man's existence he pours the glory of 
his own soul; and they rise, in shadow and sun- 
shine, softened and brightened into a beauty which 
other eyes discern not in the highest. He has a 5 
just self -consciousness, which too often degenerates 
into pride ; yet it is a noble pride, for defence, not 
for offence ; no cold suspicious feeling, but a frank 
and social one. (The Peasant Poet bears himself, 
we might say, like a King in exile: he is cast 10 
among the low, and feels himself equal to the high- 
est; yet he claims no rank, that none may be dis- 
puted to him. ) The forward he can repel, the 
supercilious he can subdue; pretensions of wealth 
or ancestry are of no avail with him; there is a 15 
fire in that dark eye, under which the ''insolence 
of condescension" cannot thrive. In his abase- 
ment, in his extreme need, he forgets not for a 
moment the majesty of Poetry and Manhood. And 
yet, far as he feels himself above common men, he 20 
wanders not apart from them, but mixes warmly in 
their interests; nay, throws himself into their 
arms, and, as it were, entreats them to love him. 
It is moving to see how, in his darkest despond- 
ency, this proud being still seeks relief from 25 
friendship; unbosoms himself, often to the 
unworthy; and, amid tears, strains to his glowing 
heart a heart that knows only the name of friend- 
ship. And yet he was "quick to learn;" a man of 
keen vision, before whom common disguises 30 



BURNS 55 

afforded no concealment. His understanding saw 
through the hollowness even of accomplished de- 
ceivers ; but there was a generous credulity in his 
heart. And so did our Peasant show himself 

5 among us; "a soul like an iEolian harp, in whose 
strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through them, 
changed itself into articulate melody. " And this 
was he for whom the world found no fitter business 
than quarreling with smugglers and vintners, com- 

10 puting excise-dues upon tallow, and gauging ale- 
barrels ! In such toils was that mighty Spirit sor- 
rowfully wasted : and a hundred years may pass on, 
before another such is given us to waste. 

All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has 
15 left, seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than 
a poor mutilated fraction of what was in him; 
brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never 
show itself complete; that wanted all things for 
completeness: culture, leisure, true effort, nay, 
20 even length of life. His poems are, with scarcely 
any exception, mere occasional effusions; poured 
forth with little premeditation ; expressing, by such 
means as offered, the passion, opinion, or humour of 
the hour. Never in one instance was it permitted 
25 him to grapple with any subject with the full col- 
lection of his strength, to fuse and mould it in the 
concentrated fire of his genius. To try by the strict 
rules of Art such imperfect fragments, would be at 
once unprofitable and unfair. Nevertheless, there 



56 CARLYLE'S 

is something in these poems, marred and defective 
as they are, which forbids the most fastidious stu- 
dent of poetry to pass them by. Some sort of 
enduring quality they must have: for after fifty 
years of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic taste, they 5 
still continue to be read ; nay, are read more and 
more eagerly, more and more extensively ; and this 
not only by literary virtuosos, and that class upon 
whom transitory causes operate most strongly, but 
by all classes, down to the most hard, unlettered, 10 
and truly natural class, who read little, and especi- 
ally no poetry, except because they find pleasure in 
it. The grounds of so singular and wide a popu- 
larity, which extends, in a literal sense, from the 
palace to the hut, and over all regions where the 15 
English tongue is spoken, are well worth inquiring 
into. After every just deduction, it seems to 
imply some rare excellence in these works. What 
is that excellence? 

To answer this question will not lead us far. 20 
The excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the 
rarest, whether in poetry or prose; but, at the 
same time, it is plain and easily recognized: his 
Sincerity, his indisputable air of Truth. Here 
are no fabulous woes or joys ; no hollow fantastic 25 
sentimentalities; no wiredrawn refinings, either in 
thought or feeling : the passion that is traced before 
us has glowed in a living heart; the opinion he 
utters has risen in his own understanding, and been 
a light to his own steps. He does not write from 30 



BURNS 57 

hearsay, but from sight and experience ; it is the 
scenes that he has lived and laboured amidst, that 
he describes : those scenes, rude and humble as they 
are, have kindled beautiful emotions in his soul, 
5 noble thoughts, and definite resolves ; and he speaks 
forth what is in him, not from any outward call of 
vanity or interest, but because his heart is too full to 
be silent. He speaks it with such melody and mod- 
ulation as he can ; "in homely rustic jingle ; " but it 

10 is his own, and genuine. This is the grand secret 
for finding readers and retaining them: let him 
who would move and convince others, be first 
moved and convinced himself. Horace's rule, Si 
vis me flere, is applicable in a wider sense than 

is the literal one. To every poet, to every writer, we 
might say : Be true, if you would be believed. Let 
a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness 
the thought, the emotion, the actual condition of 
his own heart ; and other men, so strangely are we 

20 all knit together by the tie of sympathy, must and 
will give heed to him. In culture, in extent of 
view, we may stand above the speaker, or below 
him; but in either case, his words, if they are 
earnest and sincere, will find some response within 

25 us ; for in spite of all casual varieties in outward 
rank or inward, as face answers to face, so does 
the heart of man to man. 

This may appear a very simple principle, and 
one which Burns had little merit in discovering. 

30 True, the discovery is easy enough ; but the prac- 



58 CARLYLE'S 

tical appliance is not easy,- is indeed the funda- 
mental difficulty which all poets have to strive 
with, and which scarcely one in the hundred ever 
fairly surmounts. A head too dull to discriminate 
the true from the false ; a heart too dull to love the 5 
one at all risks, and to hate the other in spite of all 
temptations, are alike fatal to a writer. With 
either, or, as more commonly happens, with both 
of these deficiencies, combine a love of distinction, 
a wish to be original, which is seldom wanting; 10 
and we have Affectation, the bane ol literature, as 
Cant, its elder brother, is of morals. How often 
does the one and the other front us, in poetry, as 
in life ! Great poets themselves are not always free 
of this vice ; nay, it is precisely on a certain sort 15 
and degree of greatness that it is most commonly 
ingrafted. A strong effort after excellence will 
sometimes solace itself with a mere shadow of suc- 
cess ; he who has much to unfold, will sometimes 
unfold it imperfectly. Byron, for instance, was 20 
no common man: yet if we examine his poetry 
with this view, we shall find it far enough from 
faultless. Generally speaking, we should say that 
it is not true. He refreshes us, not with the 
divine fountain, but too often with vulgar strong 25 
waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon 
ending in dislike, or even nausea. Are his Harolds 
and Giaours, we would ask, real men; we mean, 
poetically consistent and conceivable men? Do 
not these characters, does not the character of their 30 



BURNS 59 

author, which more or less shines through them all, 
rather appear a thing put on for the occasion ; no 
natural or possible mode of being, but something 
intended to look much grander than nature? 
5 Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic 
heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody 
desperation, with so much scowling, and teeth- 
gnashing, and other sulphurous humour, is more 
like the brawling of a player in some paltry tragedy, 
10 which is to last three hours, than the bearing of a 
man in the business of life, which is to last three- 
score and ten years. To our minds there is a taint 
of this sort, something which we should call 
theatrical, false, affected, in every one of these 
15 otherwise so powerful pieces. Perhaps Don Juan, 
especially the latter parts of it, is the only thing 
approaching to a sincere work, he ever wrote; the 
only work where he showed himself, in any meas- 
ure, as he was ; and seemed so intent on his Bilb- 
ao ject as, for moments, to forget himself. Yet 
Byron hated this vice; we believe, heartily detested 
it : nay, he had declared formal war against it in 
words. So difficult is it even for the strongest to 
make this primary attainment, which might seem 
25 the simplest of all : to read its own consciousness 
without mistakes, without errors involuntary or 
wilful! We recollect no poet of Burns's suscepti- 
bility who comes before us from the first, and abides 
with us to the last, with such a total want of affecta- 
30 tion. He is an honest man, and an honest writer. 



60 CARLYLE'S 

In his successes and his failures, in his greatness 
and his littleness, he is ever clear, simple, true, and 
glitters with no lustre but his own. We reckon 
this to be a great virtue; to be, in fact, the root of 
most other virtues, literary as well as moral. 5 

Here, however, let us say, it is to the Poetry of 
Burns that we now allude; to those writings which 
he had time to meditate, and where no special 
reason existed to warp his critical feeling, or 
obstruct his endeavour to fulfil it. Certain of his 10 
Letters, and other fractions of prose composition, 
by no means deserve this praise. Here, doubtless, 
there is not the same natural truth of style ; but on 
the contrary, something not only stiff, but strained 
and twisted; a certain high-flown inflated tone; 15 
the stilting emphasis of which contrasts ill with the 
firmness and rugged simplicity of even his poorest 
verses. Thus no man, it would appear, is alto- 
gether unaffected. Does not Shakspeare himself 
sometimes premeditate the sheerest bombast ! But 20 
even with regard to these Letters of Burns, it is 
but fair to state that he had two excuses. The 
first was his comparative deficiency in language. 
Burns, though for most part he writes with singular 
force, and even gracefulness, is not master of 25 
English prose, as he is of Scottish verse ; not master 
of it, we mean, in proportion to the depth and 
vehemence of his matter. These Letters strike us 
as the effort of a man to express something which 
he has no organ fit for expressing. But a second 30 



BURNS 61 

and weightier excuse is to be found in the pecul- 
iarity of Burns 's social rank. His correspondents 
are often men whose relation to him he has never 
accurately ascertained; whom therefore he is either 
5 forearming himself against, or else unconsciously 
flattering, by adopting the style he thinks will 
please them. At all events, we should remember 
that these faults, even in his Letters, are not .the 
rule, but the exception. Whenever he writes, as 

10 one would ever wish to do, to trusted friends and 
on real interests, his style becomes simple, vigorous, 
expressive, sometimes even beautiful. His letters 
to Mrs. Dunlop are uniformly excellent. 

But we return to his Poetry. In addition to its 

15 Sincerity, it has another peculiar merit, which 
indeed is but a mode, or perhaps a means, of the 
foregoing : this displays itself in his choice of sub- 
jects; or rather in his indifference as to subjects, 
and the power he has of making all subjects 

20 interesting. The ordinary poet, like the ordinary 
man, is forever seeking in external circumstances 
the help which can be found only in himself. In 
what is familiar and near at hand, he discerns no 
form or comeliness: home is not poetical, but 

25 prosaic; it is in some past, distant, conventional 
heroic world, that poetry resides for him ; were he 
there and not here, were he thus and not so, it 
would be well with him. Hence our innumerable 
host of rose-coloured Novels and ironmailed Epics, 

30 with their locality not on the earth, but somewhere 



62 CARLYLE'S 

nearer to the Moon. Hence our Virgins of the 
Sun, and our Knights of the Cross, malicious 
Saracens in turbans, and copper -cotoired Chiefs in 
wampum, and so many otmf trulifllent figures 
from the heroic times or the heroic climates, who 5 
on all hands swarm in our poetry. Peace be with 
them! But yet, as a great moralist proposed 
preaching to the men of this century, so would we 
fain preach to the poets, "a serm©n on the duty of 
staying at home." Let them bf gure that heroic 10 
ages and heroic climates can dj( 'little for them. 
That form of life has attraction $or us, less because 
it is better or nobler than our fwn, than sjifcply 
because it is different; and even this attraction 
must be of the most transient sort. For wilp«not is 
our own age, one day, be an ancient one ; and have 
as quaint a costume as the rest; not contrasted 
with the rest, therefore, but ranked along with 
them, in respect of quaintness? Does Homer inter- 
est us now, because he wrote of what passed beyond 20 
his native Greece, and two centuries before he was 
born ; or because he wrote what passed in God's 
world, and in the heart of man, which is the same 
after thirty centuries? Let our poets look to this : 
is their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision 25 
deeper than that of other men, — they have nothing 
to fear, even from the humblest subject ; is it not 
so, — they have nothing to hope, but an ephemeral 
favour, even from the highest. 

The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek 30 



BURNS 63 

for a subject: the elements of his art are in him, 
and around him on every hand ; for him the Ideal 
world is not remote from the Actual, but under it 
and within it : nay, he is a poet, precisely because 

5 he can discern it there. Wherever there is a sky 
above him, and a world around him, the poet is in 
his place; for here too is man's existence, with its 
infinite longings and small acquirings; its ever- 
thwarted, ever -renewed endeavours ; its unspeakable 

10 aspirations, its fears and hopes that wander through 
Eternity ; and all the mystery of brightness and of 
gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or cli- 
mate, since man first began to live. Is there not 
the fifth act of a Tragedy in every death-bed, 

15 though it were a peasant's, and a bed of heath? 
And are wooings and weddings obsolete, that there 
can be Comedy no longer? Or are men suddenly 
grown wise, that Laughter must no longer shake 
his sides, but be cheated of his Farce? Man's life 

20 and nature is as it was, and as it will ever be. But 
the poet must have an eye to read these things, and 
a heart to understand them ; or they come and pass 
away before him in vain. He is a vates, a seer ; a 
gift of vision has been given him. Has life no 

25 meanings for him which another cannot equally 
decipher ; then he is no poet, and Delphi itself will 
not make him one. 

In this respect, Burns, though not perhaps abso- 
lutely a great poet, better manifests his capability, 

30 better proves the truth of his genius, than if he 



64 CARLYLE'S 

had by his own strength kept the whole Minerva 
Press going, to the end of his literary course. He 
shows himself at least a poet of Nature's own mak- 
ing; and Nature, after all, is still the grand agent 
in making poets. We often hear of this and the 5 
other external condition being requisite for the 
existence of a poet. Sometimes it is a certain sort 
of training ; he must have studied certain things, 
studied for instance "the elder dramatists," and so 
learned a poetic language ; as if poetry lay in the 10 
tongue, not in the heart. At other times we are 
told he must be bred in a certain rank, and must 
be on confidential footing with the higher classes ; 
because, above all things, he must see the world. 
As to seeing the world, we apprehend this will 15 
cause him little difficulty, if he have but eyesight 
to see it with. Without eyesight, indeed, the task 
might be hard. The blind or the purblind man 
4 'travels from Dan to Beersheba, and finds it all 
barren." But happily every poet is born in the 20 
world; and sees it, with or against his will, every 
day and every hour he lives. ^ The mysterious 
workmanship of man's heart, the true light and 
the inscrutable darkness of man's destiny, reveal 
themselves not only in capital cities and crowded 25 
saloons, but in every hut and hamlet where men 
have their abode J Nay, do not the elements of all 
human virtues and all human vices ; the passions at 
once of a Borgia and of a Luther, lie written, in 
stronger or fainter lines, in the consciousness of 30 



BURNS 65 

every individual bosom that has practised honest 
self-examination? Truly, this same world may be 
seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we look well, as 
clearly as it ever came to light in Crockford's, or 

5 the Tuileries itself. 

But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid 
on the poor aspirant to poetry ; for it is hinted that 
he should have been bom two centuries ago; inas- 
much as poetry, about that date, vanished from the 

10 earth, and became no longer attainable by men! 
Such cobweb speculations have, now and then, 
overhung the field of literature ; but they obstruct 
not the growth of any plant there: the Shak- 
speare or the Burns, unconsciously, and merely as 

15 he walks onward, silently brushes them away. Is 
not every genius an impossibility till he appear? 
Why do we call him new and original, if we saw 
where his marble was lying, and what fabric he 
could rear from it? It is not the material, but the 

20 workman that is wanting. It is not the dark place 
that hinders, but the dim eye. A Scottish peas- 
ant's life was the meanest and rudest of all lives, till 
Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it; found 
it a man's life, and therefore significant to men. 

25 A thousand battle-fields remain unsung ; but the 
Wounded Hare has not perished without its 
memorial ; a balm of mercy yet breathes on us from 
its dumb agonies, because a poet was there. Our 
Halloiveen had passed and repassed, in rude awe 

30 and laughter, since the era of the Druids ; but no 



66 CARLYLE'S 

Theocritus, till Burns, discerned in it the materials 
of a Scottish Idyl : neither was the Holy Fair any 
Council of Trent or Eoman Jubilee; but neverthe- 
less Superstition and Hypocrisy and Fun having 
been propitious to him, in this man's hand it 5 
became a poem, instinct with satire and genuine 
comic life. Let but the true poet be given us, we 
repeat it, place him where and how you will; and 
true poetry will not be wanting. 
£^ Independently of the essential gift of poetic feel- 10 
ing, as we have now attempted to describe it, a 
certain rugged sterling worth pervades whatever 
Burns has written ; a virtue, as of green fields and 
mountain breezes, dwells in his poetry; it is 
redolent of natural life and hardy natural men. 15 
There is a decisive strength in him, and yet a sweet 
native gracefulness : he is tender, he is vehement, 
yet without constraint or too visible effort ; he melts 
the heart, or inflames it, with a power which seems 
habitual and familiar to him. We see that in this 20 
man there was the gentleness, the trembling pity 
of a woman, with the deep earnestness, the force 
and passionate ardour of a hero. Tears lie in him, 
and consuming fire ; as lightning lurks in the drops 
of the summer cloud. He has a resonance in his 25 
bosom for every note of human feeling; the high 
and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, the joyful, are 
welcome in their turns to his "lightly-moved and 
all-conceiving spirit. 1 ' And observe with what a 
fierce prompt force he grasps his subject, be it 30 



BURNS 67 

what it may ! How he fixes, as it were, the full 
image of the matter in his eye ; full and clear in 
every lineament; and catches the real type and 
essence of it, amid a thousand accidents and super - 

5 ficial circumstances, no one of which misleads him! 
Is it of reason ; some truth to be discovered? No 
sophistry, no vain surface-logic detains him; 
quick, resolute, unerring, he pierces through into 
the marrow of the question ; and speaks his verdict 

10 with an emphasis that cannot be forgotten. Is it 
of description; some visual object to be repre- 
sented? No poet of any age or nation is more 
graphic than Burns : the characteristic features dis- 
close themselves to him at a glance ; three lines from 

is his hand, and we have a likeness. And, in that 
rough dialect, in that rude, often awkward metre, 
so clear and definite a likeness! It seems a 
draughtsman working with a burnt stick ; and yet 
the burin of a Retzsch is not more expressive or exact. 

20 Of this last excellence, the plainest and most com- 
prehensive of all, being indeed the root and founda- 
tion of every sort of talent, poetical or intellectual, 
we could produce innumerable instances from the 
writings of Burns. Take these glimpses of a snow- 

25 storm from his Winter Night (the italics are ours) : 

When biting Boreas, fell and doure, 
Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r, 
And Phoebus gies a short-liv , d glowr 
Far south the lift, 
30 Dim-dark'ning thro' the flaky show'r 

Or whirling drift: 



68 CARLYLE'S 

'Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd, 
Poor labour sweet in sleep was lock'd, 
While burns wi' snowy wreeths upchok'd 

Wild-eddying swirl, 
Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd 5 

Down headlong hurl. 

Are there not "descriptive touches" here? The 
describer saw this thing ; the essential feature and 
true likeness of every circumstance in it ; saw, and 
not with the eye only. "Poor labour locked in 10 
sweet sleep ; " the dead stillness of man, unconscious, 
vanquished, yet not unprotected, while such strife 
of the material elements rages, and seems to reign 
supreme in loneliness : this is of the heart as well 
as of the eye ! — Look also at his image of a thaw, is 
and prophesied fall of the Aula* Brig: 

When heavy, dark, continued, a' -day rains 

Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains; 

When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil, 

Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains boil, 20 

Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course, 

Or haunted Garpal* draws his feeble source, 

Arous'd by blust'ring winds and spotting thowes, 

In mony a torrent down his snaw-broo rowes; 

While crashing ice, borne on the roaring speat, 25 

Sweeps dams and mills and brigs a' to the gate; 

And from Glenbuck down to the Rottonkey, 

Auld Ayr is just one lengthen' d tumbling sea; 

Then down ye'll hurl, Deil nor ye never rise! 

And dash the gamlie jaups up to the pouring shies. 30 

The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of that 
Deluge! The welkin has, as it were, bent down 
*Fabulosu8 Hydaspes ! 



BURNS 69 

with its weight; the "gumlie jaups" and the 
"pouring skies" are mingled together; it is a 
world of rain and ruin. — In respect of mere 
clearness and minute fidelity, the Farmer's com- 

5 mendation of his Aald Mare, in plough or in cart, 
may vie with Homer's Smithy of the Cyclops, or 
yoking of Priam's Chariot. Nor have we forgotten 
stout Bum-the- Wind and his brawny customers, 
inspired by Scotch Drink: but it is needless to mul- 

10 tiply examples. One other trait of a much finer 
sort we select from multitudes of such among his 
Songs. It gives, in a single line, to the saddest -feel- 
ing the saddest environment and local habitation : 

The pale Moon is setting beyond the white wave, 
15 And Time is setting wV me, 0; 

Farewell, false friends ! false lover, farewell ! 
I'll nae mair trouble them nor thee, O. 

This clearness of sight we have called the foun- 
dation of all talent ; for in fact, unless we see our 

20 object, how shall we know how to place or prize it, 
in our understanding, our imagination, our affec- 
tions? Yet it is not in itself, perhaps, a very high 
excellence; but capable of being united indiffer- 
ently with the strongest, or with ordinary powers. 

25 Homer surpasses all men in this quality: but 
strangely enough, at no great distance below him 
are Richardson and Defoe. It belongs, in truth, 
to what is called a lively mind; and gives no sure 
indication of the higher endowments that may 

30 exist along with it. In all the three cases we have 



70 CARLYLE'S 

mentioned, it is combined with great garrulity; 
their descriptions are detailed, ample and lovingly- 
exact; Homer's fire bursts through, from time to 
time, as if by accident ; but Defoe and Richardson 
have no fire. Burns, again, is not more distin- 5 
guished by the clearness than by the impetuous 
force of his conceptions. Of the strength, the 
piercing emphasis with which he thought, his 
emphasis of expression may give a humble but the 
readiest proof. Who ever uttered sharper sayings 10 
than his ; words more memorable, now by their burn- 
ing vehemence, now by their cool vigour and laconic 
pith? A single phrase depicts a whole subject, a 
whole scene. We hear of "a gentleman that de- 
rived his patent of nobility direct from Almighty 15 
God. ' ' Our Scottish forefathers in the battle-field 
struggled forward, he says, "red-ivat-shod:" giving 
in this one word, a full vision of horror and car- 
nage ; perhaps too frightfully accurate for Art ! 

In fact, one of the leading features in the mind 20 
of Burns is this vigour of his strictly intellectual 
perceptions. A resolute force is ever visible in his 
judgments, and in his feelings and volitions. Pro- 
fessor Stewart says of him, with some surprise: 
"All the faculties of Burns 's mind were, as far as I 25 
could judge, equally vigorous; and his predilec- 
tion for poetry was rather the result of his own 
enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a 
genius exclusively adapted to that species of com- 
position. From his conversation I should have 30 



BURNS 71 

pronounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever 
walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abili- 
ties." But this, if we mistake not, is at all times 
the very essence of a truly poetical endowment. 

o Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where 
the whole consists in a weak-eyed maudlin sensi- 
bility, and a certain vague, random tunefulness of 
nature, is no separate faculty, no organ which can 
be superadded to the rest, or disjoined from them; 

10 but rather the result of their general harmony and 
completion. The feelings, the gifts, that exist in 
the Poet are those that exist, with more or less 
development, in every human soul: the imagina- 
tion which shudders at the Hell of Dante, is the 

15 same faculty, weaker in degree, which called that 
picture into being. How does the Poet speak to 
men, with power, but by being still more a man 
than they? Shakspeare, it has been well observed, 
in the planning and completing of his tragedies, 

20 has shown an Understanding, were it nothing 
more, which might have governed states, or indited, 
a Novum Organum. What Burns 's force of under- 
standing may have been, we have less means of 
judging: it had to dwell among the humblest 

25 objects ; never saw Philosophy ; never rose, except 
by natural effort and for short intervals, into the 
region of great ideas. Nevertheless, sufficient 
indication, if no proof sufficient, remains for us in 
his works : we discern the brawny movements of a 

30 gigantic though untutored strength; and can 



72 CARLYLE'S 

understand how, in conversation, his quick sure 
insight into men and things may, as much as 
aught else abo:;t him, have amazed the best think- 
ers of his time and country. 

But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of 5 
Burns is fine as well as strong. The more deli- 
cate relations of things could not well have escaped 
his eye, for they were intimately present to his 
heart. The logic of the senate and the forum is 
indispensable, but not all-sufficient ; nay, perhaps 10 
the highest Truth is that which will the most 
certainly elude it. For this logic works by words, 
and "the highest," it has been said, "cannot be 
expressed in words." We are not without tokens 
of an openness for this higher truth also, of a keen 15 
though uncultivated sense for it, having existed in 
Burns. Mr. Stewart, it will be remembered, "won- 
ders," in the passage above quoted, that Burns had 
formed some distinct conception of the "doctrine 
of association." We rather think that far subtler 20 
things than the doctrine of association had from of 
old been familiar to him. Here for instance : 

"We know nothing, " thus writes he, "or next to 
nothing, of the structure of our souls, so we cannot 
account for those seeming caprices in them, that one 25 
should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck 
with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes 
no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite 
flowers in spring, among which are the mountain- 
daisy, the harebell, the fox glove, the wild-brier rose, 30 
the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I 



BURNS 73 

view and hang over with particular delight. I never 
hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a sum- 
mer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of 
gray plover in an autumnal morning, without feeling 

5 an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or 
poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be 
owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the 
iEolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the 
passing accident; or do these workings argue some- 

10 thing within us above the trodden clod? I own 
myself partial to such proofs of those awful and impor- 
tant realities: a God that made all things, man's 
immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of weal 
or woe beyond death and the grave." 

15 Force and fineness of understanding are often 
spoken of as something different from general force 
and fineness of nature, as something partly inde- 
pendent of them. The necessities of language so 
require it ; but in truth these qualities are not dis- 

20 tinct and independent : except in special cases, and 
from special causes, they ever go together. A 
man of strong understanding is generally a man of 
strong character; neither is delicacy in the one 
kind often divided from delicacy in the other. 

25 No one, at all events, is ignorant that in the 
Poetry of Burns keenness of insight keeps pace with 
keenness of feeling ; that his light is not more per- 
vading than his warmth. He is a man of the 
most impassioned temper ; with passions not strong 

30 only, but noble, and of the sort in which great 
virtues and great poems take their rise. It is 
reverence, it is love towards all Nature that 



74 CARLYLE'S 

inspires him, that opens his eyes to its beauty, and 
makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. There 
is a true old saying, that "Love furthers knowl- 
edge:" but above all, it is the living essence of 
that knowledge which makes poets ; the first prin- 5 
ciple of its existence, increase, activity. Of Burns 's 
fervid affection, his generous all-embracing Love, 
we have spoken already, as of the grand distinc- 
tion of his nature, seen equally in word and deed, • 
in his Life and in his Writings. It were easy to 10 
multiply examples. Not man only, but all that 
environs man in the material and moral universe, 
is lovely in his sight: "the hoary hawthorn," the 
"troop of gray plover," the "solitary curlew," all 
are dear to him ; all live in this Earth along with 15 
him, and to all he is knit as in mysterious brother- 
hood. How touching is it, for instance, that, 
amidst the gloom of personal misery, brooding 
over the wintry desolation without him and within 
him, he thinks of the "ourie cattle" and "silly 20 
sheep," and their sufferings in the pitiless storm! 

I thought me on the ourie cattle, 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 

O' wintry war, 
Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, 25 

Eeneath a scaur. 
Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, 
That in the merry months o' spring 
Delighted me to hear thee sing, 

What comes o' thee? 3° 

Where wilt thou cow'r thy cluttering wing, 

And close thy ee? 



BURNS 75 

The tenant of the mean hut, with its "ragged 
roof and chinky wall," has a heart to pity even 
these ! This is worth several homilies on Mercy ; 
for it is the voice of Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, 
5 lives in sympathy; his soul rushes forth into all 
realms of being ; nothing that has existence can be 
indifferent to him. The very Devil he cannot 
hate with right orthodoxy : 

But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben ; 
10 O, wad ye tak a thought and men' ! 

Ye aiblins might, — I dinna ken, — 

Still hae a stake ; 
I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 

Even for your sake ! 

15 " 'He is the father of curses and lies,' said Dr. 
Slop; 'and is cursed and damned already.' — 'I am 
sorry for it,' quoth my uncle Toby!" — A Poet 
without Love were a pl^sical and metaphysical 
impossibility. 

20 But has it not been said, in contradiction to this 
principle, that "Indignation makes verses"? It 
has been so said, and is true enough : but the con- 
tradiction is apparent, not real. The Indignation 
which makes verses is, properly speaking, an 

25 inverted Love ; the love of some right, some worth, 
some goodness, belonging to ourselves or others, 
which has been injured, and which this tempes- 
tuous feeling issues forth to defend and avenge. 
~No selfish fury of heart, existing there as a primary 

30 feeling, and without its opposite, ever produced 



76 CARLYLE'S 

much Poetry: otherwise, we suppose, the Tiger 
were the most musical of all our choristers. 
Johnson said he loved a good hater ; by which he 
must have meant, not so much one that hated 
violently, as one that hated wisely ; hated baseness 5 
from love of nobleness. However, in spite of 
Johnson's paradox, tolerable enough for once in 
speech, but which need not have been so often 
adopted in print since then, we rather believe that 
good men deal sparingly in hatred, either wise or 10 
unwise: nay, that a "good" hater is still a 
desideratum in this world. The Devil, at least, 
who passes for the chief and best of that class, is 
said to be nowise an amiable character. 

Of the verses which Indignation makes, Burns 15 
has also given us specimens : and among the best 
that were ever given. Who will forget his 
"Dweller in yon Dungeon dark;" a piece that 
might have been chanted by the Furies of 
iEschylus? The secrets of the infernal Pit are 20 
laid bare; a boundless, baleful "darkness visible;" 
and streaks of hell -fire quivering madly in its black 
haggard bosom ! 

Dweller in yon Dungeon dark, 

Hangman of Creation, mark ! 25 

Who in widow's weeds appears, 

Laden with unhonoured years, 

Noosing with care a bursting purse, 

Baited with many a deadly curse? 

Why should we speak of "Scots ivha hae wf 30 



BURNS 77 

Wallace Med;" since all know of it, from the king 
to the meanest of his subjects? This dithyrambic 
was composed on horseback; in riding in the 
middle of tempests, over the wildest Galloway 

5 moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, observing 
the poet's looks, forbore to speak, — judiciously 
enough, for a man composing Bruce 1 s Address 
might be unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this 
stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, 

10 through the soul of Burns : but to the external ear, 
it should be sung with the throat of the whirlwind. 
So long as there is warm blood in the heart of 
Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce thrills 
under this war -ode ; the best, we believe, that was 

15 ever written by any pen. 

Another wild stormful Song, that dwells in our 
ear and mind with a strange tenacity, is Mac- 
pher son's Fareivell. Perhaps there is something in 
the tradition itself that cooperates. For was not 

20 this grim Celt, this shaggy Northland Cacus, that 
* 'lived a life of sturt and strife, and died by 
treacherie," — was not he too one of the Nimrods 
and Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his 
own remote misty glens, for want of a clearer and 

25 wider one? Nay, was there not a touch of grace 
given him? A fibre of love and softness, of poetry 
itself, must have lived in his savage heart : for he 
composed that air the night before his execution ; 
on the wings of that poor rnelody, his better soul 

30 would soar away above oblivion, pain, and all the 



78 CARLYLE'S 

ignominy and despair, which, like an avalanche, 
was hurling him to the abyss! Here also, as at 
Thebes, and in Pelops' line, was material Fate 
matched against man's Free-will; matched in 
bitterest though obscure duel ; and the ethereal soul 5 
sank not, even in its blindness, without a cry 
which has survived it. But who, except Burns, 
could have given words to such a soul ; words that 
we never listen to without a strange half -barbarous, 
half -poetic fellow-feeling? 10 

Sae rantingly, sae icantonly, 

Sae dauntingly gaed he; 
He play'd a spring, and danced it round, 

Below the gallows-tree. 

Under a lighter disguise, the same principle of is 
Love, which we have recognized as the great char- 
acteristic of Burns, and of all true poets, occasion- 
ally manifests itself in the shape of Humour. 
Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny moods, a full 
buoyant flood of mirth rolls through the mind of 20 
Burns; he rises to the high, and stoops to the low, 
and is brother and playmate to all Nature. We 
speak not of his bold and often irresistible faculty 
of caricature; for this is Drollery rather than 
Humour : but a much tenderer sportf ulness dwells 25 
in him; and comes forth here and there, in 
evanescent and beautiful touches; as in his Address 
to the Mouse, or the Farmer's Mare, or in his 
Elegy on poor Mailie, which last may be reckoned 
his happiest effort of this kind. In these pieces 30 



BURNS 79 

there are traits of a Humour as fine as that of 
Sterne; yet altogether different, original, peculiar, 
— the Humour of Burns. 

Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many 

5 other kindred qualities of Burns 's Poetry, much 
more might be said; but now, with these poor out- 
lines of a sketch, we must prepare to quit this part 
of our subject. To speak of his individual Writ- 
ings, adequately and with any detail, would lead us 

10 far beyond our limits. As already hinted, we can 
look on but few of these pieces as, in strict critical 
language, deserving the name of Poems : they are 
rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense ; 
yet seldom essentially melodious, aerial, poetical. 

15 Tarn o ' Shanter itself, which enjoys so high a favour, 
does not appear to us at all decisively to come under 
this last category. It is not so much a poem, as a 
piece of sparkling rhetoric ; the heart and body of 
the story still lies hard and dead. He has not gone 

20 back, much less carried us back, into that dark, 
earnest, wondering age, when the tradition was 
believed, and when it took its rise; he does not 
attempt, by any new-modeling of his supernatural 
ware, to strike anew that deep, mysterious chord of 

25 human nature, which once responded to such 
things ; and which lives in us too, and will forever 
live, though silent now, or vibrating with far other 
notes, and to far different issues. Our German 
readers will understand us, when we say that he is 

30 not the Tieck but the Musaus of this tale. 



80 CARLYLE'S 

Externally it is all green and living; yet look 
closer, it is no firm growth, but only ivy on a rock. 
The piece does not properly cohere: the strange 
chasm which yawns in our incredulous imaginations 
between the Ayr public-house and the gate of 5 
Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, nay, the idea of 
such a bridge is laughed at ; and thus the Tragedy 
of the adventure becomes a mere drunken phan- 
tasmagoria, or many-coloured spectrum painted on 
ale-vapours, and the Farce alone has any reality. 10 
We do not say that Burns should have made much 
more of this tradition; we rather think that, for 
strictly poetical purposes, not much ivas to be made 
of it. Neither are we blind to the deep, varied, 
genial power displayed in what he has actually 15 
accomplished; but we find far more "Shakspear- 
ean'' qualities, as these of Tarn o' Shanter have 
been fondly named, in many of his other pieces ; 
nay, we incline to believe that this latter might 
have been written, all but quite as well, by a man 20 
who, in place of genius, had only possessed talent. 
Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most 
strictly poetical of all his "poems" is one which 
does not appear in Ourrie's Edition; but has been 
often printed before and since, under the humble 25 
title of The Jolly Beggars. The subject truly is 
among the lowest in Nature ; but it only the more 
shows our Poet 's gift in raising it into the domain 
of Art. To our minds, this piece seems thoroughly 
compacted; melted together, refined; and poured 30 



BURNS 81 

forth in one flood of true liquid harmony. It is 
light, airy, soft of movement; yet sharp and 
precise in its details ; every face is a portrait : that 
raucle carlin, that ivee Apollo, that So?i of Mars, 

5 are Scottish, yet ideal : the scene is at once a 
dream, and the very Ragcastle of "Poosie-Nansie. " 
Farther, it seems in a considerable degree com- 
plete, a real self -supporting Whole, which is the 
highest merit in a poem. The blanket of the 

10 Night is drawn asunder for a moment; in full, 
ruddy, flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions 
are seen in their boisterous revel ; for the strong 
pulse of Life vindicates its right to gladness even 
here; and when the curtain closes, we prolong the 

15 action, without effort; the next day as the last, our 
Caird and our Balladmonger are singing and 
soldiering; their "brats and callets" are hawking, 
begging, cheating; and some other night, in new 
combinations, they will wring from Fate another 

20 hour of wassail and good cheer. Apart from the 
universal sympathy with man which this again 
bespeaks in Burns, a genuine inspiration and no 
inconsiderable technical talent are manifested here. 
There is the fidelity, humour, warm life, and 

25 accurate painting and grouping of some Teniers, 
for whom hostlers and carousing peasants are not 
without significance. It would be strange, doubt- 
less, to call this the best of Burns 's writings: we 
mean to say only that it seems to us the most per- 

30 feet of its kind, as a piece of poetical composition, 



82 CARLYLE'S 

strictly so called. In the Beggars' Opera, in the 
Beggars' Bush, as other critics have already 
remarked, there is nothing which, in real poetic 
vigour, equals this Cantata; nothing, as we think, 
which comes within many degrees of it. 5 




But By far the most finished, complete, and truly 
inspired pieces of Burns are, without dispute, to be 
found among his Songs. It is here that, although 
through a small aperture, his light shines with 
least obstruction ; in its highest beauty and pure 10 
sunny clearness. The reason may be, that Song is 
a brief, simple species of composition ; and requires 
nothing so much for its perfection as genuine 
poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. Yet the 
Song has its rules equally with the Tragedy ; rules is 
which in most cases are poorly fulfilled, in many 
cases are not so much as felt. We might write a 
long essay on the Songs of Burns; which we 
reckon by far the best that Britain has yet pro- 
duced : for indeed, since the era of Queen Elizabeth, 20 
we know not that, by any other hand, aught truly 
worth attention has been accomplished in this - 
department. True, we have songs enough "by 
persons of quality;" we have tawdry, hollow, wine- 
bred madrigals; many a rhymed speech "in the 25 
flowing and watery vein of Ossorius the Portugal 
Bishop," rich in sonorous words, and, for moral, 
dashed perhaps with some tint of a sentimental 
sensuality ; all which many persons cease not from 



BURNS 83 

endeavouring to sing; though for most part, we 
fear, the music is but from the throat outwards, 
or at best from some region far enough short of the 
Soul; not in which, but in a certain inane Limbo 

5 of the Fancy, or even in some vaporous debatable- 
land on the outskirts of the Nervous System, most 
of such madrigals and rhymed speeches seem to 
have originated. 

With the Songs of Burns we must not name 

10 these things. Independently of the clear, manly, 
heartfelt sentiment that ever pervades his poetry, 
his Songs are honest in another point of view : in 
form, as well as in spirit. They do not affect to be 
set to music, but they actually and in themselves 

is are music ; they have received their life, and fash- 
ioned themselves together, in the medium of Har- 
mony, as Venus rose from the bosom of the sea. 
The story, the feeling, is not detailed, but sug- 
gested; not said, or spouted, in rhetorical com- 

20 pleteness and coherence; but sung, in fitful gushes, 
in glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, in warblings 
not of the voice only, but of the whole mind. We 
consider this to be the essence of a song ; and that 
no songs since the little careless catches, and as it 

25 were drops of song, which Shakspeare has here 
and there sprinkled over his plays, fulfil this con- 
dition in nearly the same degree as most of Burns 's 
do. Such grace and truth of external movement, 
too, presupposes in general a corresponding force 

30 and truth of sentiment and inward meaning. The 



< 

*, 



84 CARLYLE'S 

songs of Burns are not more perfect in the former 
quality than in the latter. With what tenderness 
he sings, yet with what vehemence and entireness ! 
There is a piercing wail in his sorrow, the purest 
rapture in his joy; he burns with the sternest ire, 5 
or laughs with the loudest or slyest mirth ; and yet 
he is sweet and soft, "sweet as the smile when fond 
lovers meet, and soft as their parting tear." If 
we farther take into account the immense variety 
of his subjects ; how, from the loud flowing revel 10 
in "Willie brew'd a Peck o' Maut" to the still, 
rapt enthusiasm of sadness for Mary in Heaven; 
from the glad kind greeting of Aula 1 Lang syne, or 
the comic archness of Duncan Gray, to the fire- 
eyed fury of "Scots ivha liae wV Wallace Vied,'''' he 15 
has found a tone and words for every mood of 
man's heart, — it will seem small praise if we rank 
him as the first of all our Song-writers; for we 
know not where to find one worthy of being 
second to him. 20 

It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns 's 
chief influence as an author will ultimately be 
found to depend: nor, if our Fletcher's aphorism 
is true, shall we account this a small influence. 
"Let me make the songs of a people," said he, 25 
"and you shall make its laws. ' ' Surely, if ever any 
Poet might have equaled himself with Legislators 
on this ground, it was Burns. His Songs are 
already part of the mother -tongue, not of Scotland 
only but of Britain, and of the millions that in all 30 



BURNS 85 

ends of the earth speak a British language. In 
hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in many- 
coloured joy and woe of existence, the name, the 
voice of that joy and that woe, is the name and 

5 voice which Burns has given them. Strictly speak- 
ing, perhaps no British man has so deeply affected 
the thoughts and feelings of so many men, as this 
solitary and altogether private individual, with 
means apparently the humblest. 

10 In another point of view, moreover, we incline 
to think that Burns 's influence may have been 
considerable : we mean, as exerted specially on the 
Literature of his country, at least on the Litera- 
ture of Scotland. Among the great changes which 

15 British, particularly Scottish, literature has under- 
gone since that period, one of the greatest will be 
found to consist in its remarkable increase of 
nationality. Even the English writers, most 
popular in Burns 's time, were little distinguished 

20 for their literary patriotism, in this its best sense. 
A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had, in 
good measure, taken place of the old insular home- 
feeling; literature was, as it were, without any 
local environment ; was not nourished by the affec- 

25 tions which spring from a native soil. Our Grays 
and Glovers seemed to write almost as if in vacuo; 
the thing written bears no mark of place ; it is not 
written so much for Englishmen, as for men; or 
rather, which is the inevitable result of this, for 

30 certain Generalizations which philosophy termed 



86 CARLYLE'S 

men. Goldsmith is an exception : not so Johnson ; 
the scene of his Rambler is little more English 
than that of his Rasselas. 

But if such was, in some degree, the case with 
England, it was, in the highest degree, the case 5 
with Scotland. In fact, our Scottish literature 
had, at that period, a very singular aspect ; unex- 
ampled, so far as we know, except perhaps at 
Geneva, where the same state of matters appears 
still to continue. For a long period after Scotland 10 
became British, we had no literature : at the date 
when Addison and Steele were writing their 
Spectators, our good John Boston was writing, 
with the noblest intent, but alike in defiance of 
grammar and philosophy, his Fourfold State of 15 
Man. Then came the schisms in our National 
Church, and the fiercer schisms in our Body 
Politic: Theologic ink, and Jacobite blood, with 
gall enough in both cases, seemed to have blotted 
out the intellect of the country: however, it was 20 
only obscured, not obliterated. Lord Karnes made 
nearly the first attempt, and a tolerably clumsy one, 
at writing English ; and ere long, Hume,- Kobert- 
son, Smith, and a whole host of followers, attracted 
hither the eyes of all Europe. And yet in this 25 
brilliant resuscitation of our "fervid genius," there 
was nothing truly Scottish, nothing indigenous; 
except, perhaps, the natural impetuosity of intel- 
lect, which we sometimes claim, and are sometimes 
upbraided with, as a characteristic of our nation. 30 



BURNS 87 

It is curious to remark that Scotland, so full of 
writers, had no Scottish culture, nor indeed any 
English; our culture was almost exclusively 
French. It was by studying Eacine and Voltaire, 

5 Batteux and Boileau, that Karnes had trained 
himself to be a critic and philosopher; it w r as the 
light of Montesquieu and Mably that guided 
Robertson in his political speculations ; Quesnay's 
lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. 

10 Hume was too rich a man to borrow ; and perhaps 
he reacted on the French more than he was acted 
on by them : but neither had he aught to do with 
Scotland; Edinburgh, equally with La Fleche, was 
but the lodging and laboratory, in which he not so 

15 much morally livedo as metaphysically investi- 
gated. Never, perhaps, was there a class of writers 
so clear and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, 
to all appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay, 
of any human affection whatever. The French 

20 wits of the period were as unpatriotic: but their 
general deficiency in moral principle, not to say 
their avowed sensuality and unbelief in all virtue, 
strictly so called, render this accountable enough. 
We hope there is a patriotism founded on some- 

25 thing better than prejudice ; that our country may 
be dear to us, without injury to our philosophy; 
that in loving and justly prizing all other lands, 
we may prize justly, and yet love before all others, 
our own stern Motherland, and the venerable 

30 Structure of social and moral Life, which Mind 



88 CARLYLE'S 

has through long ages been building up for us 
there. Surely there is nourishment for the better 
part of man's heart in all this: surely the roots 
that have fixed themselves in the very core of 
man's being, may be so cultivated as to grow up 5 
not into briers, but into roses, in the field of his 
life ! Our Scottish sages have no such propensities : 
the field of their life shows neither briers nor roses ; 
but only a flat, continuous thrashing-floor for 
Logic, whereon all questions, from the "Doctrine 10 
of Rent" to the "Natural History of Religion," are 
thrashed and sifted with the same mechanical 
impartiality ! 

With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our litera- 
ture, it cannot be denied that much of this evil is is 
past, or rapidly passing away: our chief literary 
men, whatever other faults they may have, no 
longer live among us like a French Colony, or some 
knot of Propaganda Missionaries; but like 
natural-born subjects of the soil, partaking and 20 
sympathizing in all our attachments, humours, and 
habits. Our literature no longer grows in water 
but in mould, and with the true racy virtues of 
the soil and climate. How much of this change 
may be due to Burns, or to any other individual, it 25 
might be difficult to estimate. Direct literary 
imitation of Burns was not to be looked for. But 
his example, in the fearless adoption of domestic 
subjects, could not but operate from afar; and 
certainly in no heart did the love of country ever 30 



BURNS 89 

burn with a warmer glow than in that of Burns : 
"a tide of Scottish prejudice," as he modestly 
calls this deep and generous feeling, "had been 
poured along his veins ; and he felt that it would 

5 boil there til] the flood-gates shut in eternal rest." 
It seemed to him, as if he could do so little for his 
country, and yet would so gladly have done all. 
One small province stood open for him, — that of 
Scottish Song; and how eagerly he entered on it, 

10 how devotedly he laboured there ! In his toilsome 
journeyings, this object never quits him ; it is the 
little happy- valley of his careworn heart. In the 
gloom of his own affliction, he eagerly searches after 
some lonely brother of the muse, and rejoices to 

15 snatch one other name from the oblivion that was 
covering it! These were early feelings, and they 
abode with him to the end : 

... A wish (I mind its power), 

A wish, that to my latest hour 
20 Shall strongly heave my breast, — 

That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, 

Some usefu' plan or book could make, 

Or sing a sang at least. 

The rough bur-thistle, spreading wide 
25 Amang the bearded bear, 

I turn'd my weeding-clips aside, 
And spared the symbol dear. 

But to leave the mere literary character of 
Burns, which has already detained us too long. 
30 Far more interesting than any of his written * 
works, as it appears to us, are his acted ones: the ) }/\ 



j 



eJ^- 



90 CARLYLE'S 

Life he willed and was fated to lead among his 
fellow-men. These Poems are but like little 
rhymed fragments scattered here and there in the 
grand unrhymed Eomance of his earthly existence ; 
and it is only when intercalated in this at their & 
proper places, that they attain their full measure of 
significance. And this too, alas, was but a 
fragment ! The plan of a mighty edifice had been 
sketched; some columns, porticos, firm masses of 
building, stand completed; the rest more or less 10 
clearly indicated ; with many a far -stretching tend- 
ency, which only studious and friendly eyes can 
now trace towards the purposed termination. For 
the work is broken off in the middle, almost in 
the beginning; and rises among us, beautiful and 15 
sad, at once unfinished and a ruin ! If charitable 
judgment was necessary in estimating his Poems, 
and justice required that the aim and the manifest 
power to fulfil it must often be accepted for the 
fulfilment ; much more is this the case in regard to 20 
his Life, the sum and result of all his endeavours, 
where his difficulties came upon him not in detail 
only, but in mass; and so much has been left 
unaccomplished, nay, was mistaken, and altogether 
marred. 25 

Properly speaking, there is but one era in the 
life of Burns, and that the earliest. We have not 
youth and manhood, but only youth: for to the 
end, we discern no decisive change in the com- 
plexion of his character; in his thirty -seventh 30 



BURNS 91 

year, he is still, as it were, in youth. With all 
that resoluteness of judgment, that penetrating 
insight, and singular maturity of intellectual power, 
exhibited in his writings, he never attains to any 

5 clearness regarding himself; to the last, he never 
ascertains his peculiar aim, even with such distinct- 
ness as is common among ordinary men ; and there- 
fore never can pursue it with that singleness of will, 
which insures success and some contentment to 

10 such men. To the last, he wavers between two 
purposes : glorying in his talent, like a true poet, he 
yet cannot consent to make this his chief and sole 
glory, and to follow it as the one thing needful, 
through poverty or riches, through good or evil 

15 report. Another far meaner ambition still cleaves 
to him ; he must dream and struggle about a cer- 
tain "Bock of Independence"; which, natural and 
even admirable as it might be, was still but a war- 
ring with the world, on the comparatively insig- 

20 nificant ground of his being more completely or less 
completely supplied with money than others; of 
his standing at a higher or at a lower altitude in 
general estimation than others. For the world 
still appears to him, as to the young, in borrowed 

25 colours : he expects from it what it cannot give to 
any man ; seeks for contentment, not within him- 
self, in action and wise effort, but from without, 
in the kindness of circumstances, in love, friend- 
ship, honour, pecuniary ease. He would be happy, 

30 not actively and in himself, but passively and from 



92 CARLYLE'S 

some ideal cornucopia of Enjoyments, not earned 
by his own labour, but showered on him by the 
beneficence of Destiny. Thus, like a young man, 
he cannot gird himself up for any worthy well- 
calculated goal, but swerves to and fro, between 5 
passionate hope and remorseful disappointment: 
rushing onwards with a deep tempestuous force, 
he surmounts or breaks asunder many a barrier ; 
travels, nay, advances far, but advancing only under 
uncertain guidance, is ever and anon turned from 10 
his path ; and to the last cannot reach the only true 
happiness of a man, that of clear decided Activity 
in the sphere for which, by nature and circum- 
stances, he has been fitted and appointed. 

We do not say these things in dispraise of is 
Burns ; nay, perhaps, they but interest us the more 
in his favour. ^This blessing is not given soonest to 
the best ; but rather, it is often the greatest minds 
that are latest in obtaining it ; for where most is to 
be developed, most time may be required to 20 
develop it. j A complex condition had been assigned 
him from without; as complex a condition from 
within: no "preestablished harmony" existed 
between the clay soil of Mossgiel and the empyrean 
soul of Eobert Burns ; it was not wonderful that 25 
the adjustment between them should have been 
long postponed, and his arm long cumbered, and 
his sight confused, in so vast and discordant an 
economy as he had been appointed steward over. 
Byron was, at his death, but a year younger than 30 



BURNS 93 

Burns; and through life, as it might have 
appeared, far more simply situated : yet in him too 
we can trace no such adjustment, no such moral 
manhood; but at best, and only a little before his 

5 end, the beginning of what seemed such. 

By much the most striking incident in Burns 's 
Life is his journey to Edinburgh ; but perhaps a 
still more important one is his residence at Irvine, 
so early as in his twenty-third year. Hitherto his 

10 life had been poor and toilworn; but otherwise not 
ungenial, and, with all its distresses, by no means 
unhappy. In his parentage, deducting outward 
circumstances, he had every reason to reckon him- 
self fortunate. His father was a man of thought - 

15 ful, intense, earnest character, as the best of our 
peasants are ; valuing knowledge, possessing some, 
and, what is far better and rarer, open-minded for 
more: a man with a keen insight and devout 
heart; reverent towards God, friendly therefore at 

20 once and fearless, towards all that God has made : 
in one word, though but a hard-handed peasant, a 
complete and fully unfolded Man. Such a father 
is seldom found in any rank in society ; and was 
worth descending far in society to seek. Unfor- 

25 tunately, he was very poor ; had he been even a 
little richer, almost never so little, the whole 
might have issued far otherwise. I Mighty events 
turn on a straw ; the crossing of a brook decides 
the conquest of the world. Had this William 

30 Burns 's small seven acres of nursery-ground any- 



94 CARLYLE'S 

wise prospered, the boy Robert had been sent to 
school ; had struggled forward, as so many weaker 
men do, to some university; come forth not as a 
rustic wonder, but as a regular well -trained intel- 
lectual workman, and changed the whole course of 5 
British Literature, — for it lay in him to have done 
this! But the nursery did not prosper; poverty 
sank his whole family below the help of even our 
cheap school -system: Burns remained a hard- 
worked ploughboy, and British literature took its 10 
own course. Nevertheless, even in this rugged 
scene there is much to nourish him. If he drudges, 
it is with his brother, and for his father and 
mother, whom he loves, and would fain shield 
from want. Wisdom is not banished from their 15 
poor hearth, nor the balm of natural feeling : the 
solemn words, "Let as worship God," are heard 
there from a priest -like father ; if threat enings of 
unjust men throw mother and children into tears, 
these are tears not of grief only, but of holiest 20 
affection ; every heart in that humble group feels 
itself the closer knit to every other ; in their hard 
warfare they are there together, a "little band ©f 
brethren." Neither are such tears, and the deep 
beauty that dwells in them, their only portion. 25 
Light visits the hearts as it does the eyes of all liv- 
ing: there is a force, too, in this youth, that 
enables him to trample on misfortune; nay, to 
bind it under his feet to make him "sport. For a 
bold, warm, buoyant humour of character has been 30 



BURNS 95 

given him ; and so the thick-coming shapes of evil 
are welcomed with a gay, friendly irony, and in 
their closest pressure he bates no jot of heart or 
hope. Vague yearnings of ambition fail not, as he 

5 grows up; dreamy fancies hang like cloud-cities 
around him ; the curtain of Existence is slowly ris- 
ing, in many-coloured splendour and gloom : and the 
auroral light of first love is gilding his horizon, and 
the music of song is on his path ; and so he walks 

10 in glory and in joy, 

Behind his plough, upon the mountain side. 

We ourselves know, from the best evidence, that 
up to this date Burns was happy ; nay, that he was 
the gayest, brightest, most fantastic, fascinating 

is being to be found in the world ; more so even than 
he afterwards appeared. But now, at this early 
age, he quits the paternal roof; goes forth into 
looser, louder, more exciting society; and becomes 
initiated in those dissipations, those vices, which a 

20 certain class of philosophers have asserted to be a 
natural preparative for entering on active life; a 
kind of mud-bath, in which the youth is, as it 
were, necessitated to steep, and, we suppose, 
cleanse himself, before the real toga of Manhood 

25 can be laid on him. We shall not dispute much 
with this class of philosophers ; we hope they are 
mistaken : for Sin and Eemorse so easily beset us 
at all stages of life, and are always such indifferent 
company, that it seems hard we should, at any 

30 stage, be forced and fated not only to meet but to 



96 CARLYLE'S 

yield to them, and even serve for a term in their 
leprous armada. We hope it is not so. Clear we 
are, at all events, it cannot be the training one 
receives in this Devil's service, but only our 
determining to desert from it, that fits us for true 5 
manly Action. We become men, not after we 
have been dissipated, and disappointed in the chase 
of false pleasure ; but after we have ascertained, in 
any way, what impassable barriers hem us in 
through this life ; how mad it is to hope for con- 10 
tentment to our infinite soul from the gifts of this 
extremely finite world; that a man must be 
sufficient for himself; and that for suffering and 
enduring there is no remedy but striving and doing. 
Manhood begins when we have in any way made 15 
truce with Necessity ; begins even when we have 
surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only do ; 
but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have 
reconciled ourselves to Necessity ; and thus, in real- 
ity, triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we 20 
are free. Surely, such lessons as this last, which, 
in one shape or other, is the grand lesson for every 
mortal man, are better learned from the lips of a 
devout mother, in the looks and actions of a devout 
father, while the heart is yet soft and pliant, than 25 
in collision with the sharp adamant of Fate, attract- 
ing us to shipwreck us, when the heart is grown 
hard, and may be broken before it will become 
contrite. Had Burns continued to learn this, as 
he was already learning it, in his father's cottage, so 



JHJRNS 97 

he would have learned it fully, which he never 

did; and been saved many a lasting aberration, 

many a bitter hour and year of remorseful sorrow. 

It seems to us another circumstance of fatal 

5 import in Burns 's history, that at this time too he 
became involved in the religious quarrels of his 
district; that he was enlisted and feasted, as the 
fighting man of the New-Light Priesthood, in 
their highly unprofitable warfare. At the tables 

10 of these free-minded clergy he learned much more 
than was needful for him. Such liberal ridicule of 
fanaticism awakened in his mind scruples about 
Eeligion itself; and a whole world of Doubts, 
which it required quite another set of conjurors 

15 than these men to exorcise. We do not say that 
such an intellect as his could have escaped similar 
doubts at some period of his history ; or even that 
he could, at a later period, have come through 
them altogether victorious and unharmed; but it 

20 seems peculiarly unfortunate that this time, above 
all others, should have been fixed for the encounter. 
For now, with principles assailed by evil example 
from without, by "passions raging like demons" 
from within, he had little need of skeptical mis- 

25 givings to whisper treason in the heat of the battle, 
or to cut off his retreat if he were already defeated. 
He loses his feeling of innocence; his mind is at 
variance with itself; the old divinity no longer 
presides there; but wild Desires and wild Eepent- 

30 ance alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he 



98 CARLYLE'S 

has committed himself before the world ; his char- 
acter for sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as 
few corrupted worldlings can even conceive, is 
destroyed in the eyes of men ; and his only refuge 
consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and 5 
is but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation 
now gathers over him, broken only by red light- 
nings of remorse. The whole fabric of his life is 
blasted asunder ; for now not only his character, 
but his personal liberty, is to be lost; men and 10 
Fortune are leagued for his hurt; "hungry Ruin 
has him in the wind. " He sees no escape but the 
saddest of all : exile from his loved country, to a 
country in every sense inhospitable and abhorrent 
to him. While the "gloomy night is gathering 15 
fast," in mental storm and solitude, as well as in 
physical, he sings his wild farewell to Scotland: 

Farewell, my friends ; farewell, my foes ! 

My peace with these, my love with those : 

The bursting tears my heart declare ; 20 

Adieu, my native banks of Aj^r ! 

Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods ; but 
still a false transitory light, and no real sunshine. 
He is invited to Edinburgh ; hastens thither with 
anticipating heart; is welcomed as in a triumph, 25 
and with universal blandishment and acclamation ; 
whatever is wisest, whatever is greatest or loveliest 
there, gathers round him, to gaze on his face, to 
show him honour, sympathy, affection. Burns 's 
appearance among the sages and nobles of Edin- 30 



BURNS 00 

burgh must be regarded as one of the most singular 
phenomena in modern Literature ; almost like the 
appearance of some Napoleon among the crowned 
sovereigns of modern Politics. For it is nowise as 

5 a "mockery king, "set there by favour, transiently 
and for a purpose, that he will let himself be 
treated ; still less is he a mad Rienzi, whose sudden 
elevation turns his too weak head; but he stands 
there on his own basis ; cool, unastonished, holding 

10 his equal rank from Nature herself ; putting forth 
no claim which there is not strength in him, as 
well as about him, to vindicate. Mr. Lockhart 
has some forcible observations on this point : 

"It needs no effort of imagination," says he, "to 

15 conceive what the sensations of an isolated set of 
scholars (almost all either clergymen or professors) 
must have been in the presence of this big-boned, black- 
browed, brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, 
who, having forced his way among them from the 

20 plough-tail at a single stride, manifested in the whole 
strain of his bearing and conversation a most thorough 
conviction, that in the society of the most eminent 
men of his nation he was exactly where he was entitled 
to be; hardly deigned to flatter them by exhibiting 

25 even an occasional symptom of being flattered by 
their notice ; by turns calmly measured himself against 
the most cultivated understandings of his time in 
discussion ; overpowered the bonsmots of the most cele- 
brated convivialists by broad floods of merriment, 

30 impregnated with all the burning life of genius; 
astounded bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice- 
piled folds of social reserve, by compelling them to 
tremble, — nay, to tremble visibly, — beneath the fear- 



100 CARLYLE'S 

less touch of natural pathos ; and all this without indi- 
cating the smallest willingness to be ranked among 
those professional ministers of excitement, who are 
content to be paid in money and smiles for doing what 
the spectators and auditors would be ashamed of 5 
doing in their own persons, even if they had the power 
of doing it; and last, and probably worst of all, who 
was known to be in the habit of enlivening societies 
which they would have scorned to approach, still more 
frequently than their own, with eloquence no less 10 
magnificent; with wit, in all likelihood still more 
daring ; often enough, as the superiors whom he fronted 
without alarm might have guessed from the begin- 
ning, and had ere long no occasion to guess, with 
wit pointed at themselves." 15 

The farther we remove from this scene, the more 
singular will it seem to us : details of the exterior 
aspect of it are already full of interest. Most 
readers recollect Mr. Walker's personal interviews 
with Burns as among the best passages of his Nar- 20 
rative : a time will come when this reminiscence of 
Sir Walter Scott's, slight though it is, will also be 
precious : 

"As for Burns," writes Sir Walter, "I may truly 
say, Virgilium vidi tantum. I was a lad of fifteen in 25 
1786-7, when he came first to Edinburgh, but had sense 
and feeling enough to be much interested in his poetry, 
and would have given the world to know him : but I 
had very little acquaintance with any literary people, 
and still less with the gentry of the west country; 30 
the two sets that he most frequented. Mr. Thomas 
Grierson was at that time a clerk of my father's. He 
knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings 



BURNS 101 

to dinner; but had no opportunity to keep his word; 
otherwise I might have seen more of this distinguished 
man. As it was, I saw him one day at the late vener- 
able Professor Ferguson's, where there were several 

5 gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I 
remember the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart. Of 
course, we youngsters sat silent, looked, and listened. 
The only thing I remember which was remarkable in 
Burns's manner, was the effect produced upon him by 

10 a print of Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead 
on the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side, — on 
the other, his widow, with a child in her arms. These 
lines were written beneath : 

"Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, 
15 Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain ; 

Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, — 
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, 
Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
The child of misery, baptized in tears. ' ' 

20 Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather 
by the ideas which it suggested to his mind. He 
actually shed tears. He asked whose the lines were ; and 
it chanced that nobody but myself remembered that 
they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's 

25 called by the unpromising title of 'The Justice of 
Peace. ' I whispered my information to a friend pres- 
ent ; he mentioned it to Burns, who rewarded me with 
a look and a word, which, though of mere civility, I 
then received and still recollect with very great pleas- 

30 ure. 

His person was strong and robust ; his manners rustic, 
not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and sim- 
plicity, which received part of its effect perhaps from 
one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His 

35 features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's picture : but 



102 CARLYLE'S 

to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if 
seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more 
massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I should 
have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for 
a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch 5 
school, i. e., none of your modern agriculturists who 
kept labourers for their drudgery, but the douce gudeman 
who held his own plough. There was a strong expres- 
sion of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments ; the 
eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and 10 
temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which 
glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with 
feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a 
human head, though I have seen the most distinguished 
men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect 15 
self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. 
Among the men who were the most learned of their 
time and country, he expressed himself with perfect 
firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness ; 
and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to 20 
express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty. 
I do not remember any part of his conversation dis- 
tinctly enough to be quoted; nor did I ever see him 
again, except in the street, where he did not recognize 
me, as I could not expect he should. He was much 25 
caressed in Edinburgh: but (considering what literary 
emoluments have been since his day) the efforts made 
for his relief were extremely trifling. 

I remember, on this occasion I mention, I thought 
Burns' s acquaintance with English poetry was rather 30 
limited ; and also that, having twenty times the abili- 
ties of Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson, he talked of 
them with too much humility as his models : there was 
doubtless national predilection in his estimate. 

This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only 35 
to add, that his dress corresponded with his manner. 



BURNS 103 

He was like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with 
the laird. I do not speak in malam partem, when I 
say, I never saw a man in company with his superiors 
in station or information more perfectly free from 

5 either the reality or the affectation of embarrassment. I 
was told, but did not observe it, that his address to 
females was extremely deferential, and always with a 
turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged 
their attention particularly. I have heard the late 

10 Duchess of Gordon remark this. — I do not know any- 
thing I can add to these recollections of forty years 
since." 

The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze 
of favour ; the calm, unaffected, manly manner in 

15 which he not only bore it, but estimated its value, 
has justly been regarded as the best proof that 
could be given of his real vigour and integrity of 
mind. A little natural vanity, some touches of 
hypocritical modesty, some glimmerings of affecta- 

20 tion, at least some fear of being thought affected, 
we could have pardoned in almost any man ; but 
no such indication is to be traced here. In his 
unexampled situation the young peasant is not a 
moment perplexed ; so many strange lights do not 

25 confuse him, do not lead him astray. Nevertheless, 
we cannot but perceive that this winter did him 
great and lasting injury. A somewhat clearer 
knowledge of men's affairs, scarcely of their charac- 
ters, it did afford him; but a sharper feeling of 

30 Fortune's unequal arrangements in their social 
destiny it also left with him. He had seen the gay 
and gorgeous arena, in which the powerful are 



104 CARLYLE'S 

born to play their parts; nay, had himself stood in 
the midst of it; and he felt more bitterly than 
ever, that here he was but a looker-on, and had no 
part or lot in that splendid game. From this time 
a jealous indignant fear of social degradation takes 5 
possession of him; and perverts, so far as aught 
could pervert, his private contentment, and his 
feelings towards his richer fellows. It was clear to 
Burns that he had talent enough to make a fortune, 
or a hundred fortunes, could he but have rightly 10 
willed this ; it was clear also that he willed some- 
thing far different, and therefore could not make 
one. Unhappy it was that he had not power to 
choose the one, and reject the other; but must 
halt forever between two opinions, two objects; 15 
making hampered advancement towards either. 
But so is it with many men: we "long for the 
merchandise, yet would fain keep the price;" and 
so stand chaffering with Fate, in vexatious alterca- 
tion, till the night come, and our fair is over ! 20 

The Edinburgh Learned of that period were 
in general more noted for clearness of head than 
for warmth of heart: with the exception of the 
good old Blacklock, whose help was too ineffectual, 
scarcely one among them seems to have looked at 25 
Burns with any true sympathy, or indeed much 
otherwise than as at a highly curious thing. By 
the great also he is treated in the customary 
fashion ; entertained at their tables and dismissed : 
certain modica of pudding and praise are, from 30 



BURNS 105 

time to time, gladly exchanged for the fascination 
of his presence ; which exchange once effected, the 
bargain is finished, and each party goes his several 
way. At the end of this strange season, Burns 

5 gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and medi- 
tates on the chaotic future. In money he is 
somewhat richer ; in fame and the show of happi- 
ness, infinitely richer ; but in the substance of it, 
as poor as ever. Nay, poorer ; for his heart is now 

10 maddened still more with the fever of worldly 
Ambition ; and through long years the disease will 
rack him with unprofitable sufferings, and weaken 
his strength for all true and nobler aims. 

What Burns was next to do or to avoid ; how a man 

15 so circumstanced was now to guide himself towards 
his true advantage, might at this point of time 
have been a question for the wisest. It was a 
question, too, which apparently he was left 
altogether to answer for himself : of his learned or 

20 rich patrons it had not struck any individual to 
turn a thought on this so trivial matter. Without 
claiming for Burns the praise of perfect sagacity, 
we must say that his Excise and Farm scheme does 
not seem to us a very unreasonable one ; that we 

25 should be at a loss, even now, to suggest one 
decidedly better. Certain of his admirers have 
felt scandalized at his ever resolving to gauge; and 
would have had him lie at the pool, till the spirit 
of Patronage stirred the waters, that so, with one 

30 friendly plunge, all his sorrows might be healed. 



106 CARLYLE'S 

Unwise counsellors ! They know not the manner 
of this spirit ; and how, in the lap of most golden 
dreams, a man might have happiness, were it not 
that in the interim he must die of hunger! It 
reflects credit on the manliness and sound sense of 5 
Burns, that he felt so early on what ground he was 
standing; and preferred self-help, on the humblest 
scale, to dependence and inaction, though with 
hope of far more splendid possibilities. But even 
these possibilities were not rejected in his scheme: 10 
he might expect, if it chanced that he had any 
friend, to rise, in no long period, into something 
even like opulence and leisure ; while again, if it 
chanced that he had no friend, he could still live in 
security; and for the rest, he "did not intend to 15 
borrow honour from any profession. " We think, 
then, that his plan was honest and well-calculated : 
all turned on the execution of it. Doubtless it 
failed ; yet not, we believe, from any vice inherent 
in itself. Nay, after all, it fras no failure of 20 
external means, but of internal, that overtook Burns. 
His was no bankruptcy of the purse, but of the 
soul ; to his last day, he owed no man anything. 
Meanwhile he begins well : with two good and 
wise actions. His donation to his mother, munifi- 25 
cent from a man whose income had lately been 
seven pounds a-year, was worthy of him, and not 
more than worthy. Generous also, and worthy of 
him, was his treatment of the woman whose life's 
welfare now depended on his pleasure. A friendly 30 



BURNS 107 

observer might have hoped serene days for him: 
his mind is on the true road to peace with itself : 
what clearness he still wants will be given as he 
proceeds ; for the best teacher of duties that still 

5 lie dim to us, is the Practice of those we see and 
have at hand. Had the "patrons of genius," who 
could give him nothing, but taken nothing from 
him, at least nothing more! The wounds of his 
heart would have healed; vulgar ambition would 

10 have died away. Toil and Frugality would have 
been welcome, since Virtue dwelt with them ; and 
Poetry would have shone through them as of old : 
and in her clear ethereal light, which was his own 
by birthright, he might have looked clown on his 

15 earthly destiny and all its obstructions, not with 
patience only, but with love. 

But the patrons of genius would not have it so. 
Picturesque tourists,* all manner of fashionable 

* There is one little sketch by certain "English gen- 
tlemen" of this class, which, though adopted in 
Currie's Narrative, and since then repeated in most 
others, we have all along felt an invincible disposition 
to regard as imaginary: "On a rock that projected into 
the stream, they saw a man employed in angling, of a 
singular appearance. He had a cap made of fox-skin on 
his head, a loose greatcoat fixed round him by a belt, 
from which depended an enormous Highland broad- 
sword. It was Burns. ' ' Now, we rather think, it was 
not Burns. For, to say nothing of the fox-skin cap, 
the loose and quite Hibernian watchcoat with the belt, 
what are we to make of this "enormous Highland 
broad-sword" depending from him? More especially, 



108 CARLYLE'S 

danglers after literature, and, far worse, all manner 
of convivial Maecenases, hovered round him in his 
retreat ; and his good as well as his weak qualities 
secured them influence over him. He was flattered 
by their notice ; and his warm social nature made 5 
it impossible for him to shake them off, and hold 
on his way apart from them. These men, as we 
believe, were proximately the means of his ruin. 
Not that they meant him any ill ; they only meant 
themselves a little good; if he suffered harm, let 10 
Mm look to it ! But they wasted his precious time 
and his precious talent; they disturbed his com- 
posure, broke down his returning habits of tem- 
perance and assiduous contented exertion. Their 
pampering was baneful to him; their cruelty, is 
which soon followed, was equally baneful. The 
old grudge against Fortune's inequality awoke 
with new bitterness in their neighbourhood; and 
Burns had no retreat but to "the Eock of Indepen- 
dence," which is but an air-castle after all, that 20 
looks well at a distance, but will screen no one from 
real wind and wet. Flushed with irregular excite- 
ment, exasperated alternately by contempt of others 
and contempt of himself, Burns was no longer 

as there is no word of parish constables on the outlook 
to see whether, as Dennis phrases it, he had an eye to 
his own midriff or that of the public! Burns, of all 
men, had the least need, and the least tendency, to seek 
for distinction either in his own eyes or those of others, 
by such poor mummeries. 



BURNS 109 

regaining his peace of mind, but fast losing it 
forever. There was a hollowness at the heart of 
his life, for his conscience did not now approve 
what he was doing. 
5 Amid the vapours of unwise enjoyment, of boot- 
less remorse, and angry discontent with Fate, his 
true loadstar, a life of Poetry, with Poverty, nay, 
with Famine if it must be so, was too often alto- 
gether hidden from his eyes. And yet he sailed a 

10 sea where without some such loadstar there was no 
right steering. Meteors of French Politics rise 
before him, but these were not Ms stars. An acci- 
dent this, which hastened, but did not originate, his 
worst distresses. In the mad contentions of that 

is time, he comes in collision with certain official 
Superiors ; is wounded by them ; cruelly lacerated, 
we should say, could a dead mechanical implement, 
in any case, be called cruel ; and shrinks, in indig- 
nant pain, into deeper self -seclusion, into gloomier 

20 moodiness than ever. His life has now lost its 
unity : it is a life of fragments ; led with little aim, 
beyond the melancholy one of securing its own 
continuance, — in fits of wild false joy when such 
offered, and of black despondency when they 

25 passed away. His character before the world 
begins to suffer : calumny is busy with him ; for a 
miserable man makes more enemies than friends* 
Some faults he has fallen into, and a thousand 
misfortunes ; but deep criminality is what he stands 

30 accused of, and they that are not without sin cast 



110 CARLYLE'S 

the first stone at him ! For is he not a well-wisher 
to the French Kevolution, a Jacobin, and therefore 
in that one act guilty of all? These accusations, 
political and moral, it has since appeared, were 
false enough: but the world hesitated little 5 
to credit them. Nay, his convivial Maecenases 
themselves were not the last to do it. There is 
reason to believe that, in his later years, the 
Dumfries Aristocracy had partly withdrawn them- 
selves from Burns, as from a tainted person no 10 
longer worthy of their acquaintance. That painful 
class, stationed, in all provincial cities, behind the 
outmost breastwork of Gentility, there to stand 
siege and do battle against the intrusions of 
Grocerdom and Grazierdom, had actually seen 15 
dishonour in the society of Burns, and branded 
him with their veto; had, as we vulgarly say, 
cut him! We find one passage in this Work 
of Mr. Lockhart's, which will not out of our 
thoughts : 20 

"A gentleman of that county, whose name I have 
already more than once had occasion to refer to, has 
often told me that he was seldom more grieved than 
when, riding into Dumfries one fine summer evening 
about this time to attend a county ball, he saw Burns 25 
walking alone, on the shady side of the principal street 
of the town, while the opposite side was gay with suc- 
cessive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn 
together for the festivities of the night, not one of whom 
appeared willing to recognize him. The horseman 30 
dismounted, and joined Burns, who, on his proposing to 
cross the street, said: 'Nay, nay, my young friend, that's 



BURNS 111 

all over now;' and quoted, after a pause, some verses of 
Lady Grizzel Baillie's pathetic ballad: 

"His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow, 
His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's new; 
5 But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, 

And casts himsel dowie upon the corn-bing. 

O, were we young as we ance hae been, 
We suld hae been galloping down on yon green, 
And linking it ower the lily-white lea ! 
10 And icerena my heart light, I lead die." 

It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on 
certain subjects escape in this fashion. He, immedi- 
ately after reciting these verses, assumed the sprightli- 
ness of his most pleasing manner ; and taking his young 
15 friend home with him, entertained him very agreeably 
till the hour of the ball arrived. ' ' 

Alas! when we think that Burns now sleeps 
"where bitter indignation can no longer lacerate 
his heart,"* and that most of those fair dames and 

20 frizzled gentlemen already lie at his side, where the 
breastwork of gentility is quite thrown down, — who 
would not sigh over the thin delusions and foolish 
toys that divide heart from heart, and make man 
unmerciful to his brother ! 

25 It was not now to be hoped that the genius of 
Burns would ever reach maturity, or accomplish 
aught worthy of itself. His spirit was jarred in its 
melody; not the soft breath of natural feeling, but 
the rude hand of Fate, was now sweeping over the 

*Ubi sceva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. 
Swift's Epitaph. 



112 CARLYLE'S 

strings. And yet what harmony was in him, what 
music even in his discords ! How the wild tones 
had a charm for the simplest and the wisest ; and 
all men felt and knew that here also was one of the 
Gifted! "If he entered an inn at midnight, after 5 
all the inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival 
circulated from the cellar to the garret ; and ere ten 
minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests 
were assembled!" Some brief pure moments of 
poetic life were yet appointed him, in the compo- 10 
sition of his Songs. We can understand how he 
grasped at this employment; and how too, he 
spurned all other reward for it but what the labour 
itself brought him. For the soul of Burns, though 
scathed and marred, was yet living in its full moral is 
strength, though sharply conscious of its errors and 
abasement : and here in his destitution and 
degradation, was one act of seeming nobleness 
and self-devotedness left even for him to perform. 
He felt too, that with all the "thoughtless follies" 20 
that had "laid him low," the world was unjust 
and cruel to him; and he silently appealed to 
another and calmer time. Not as a hired soldier, 
but as a patriot, would he strive for the glory of his 
country: so he cast from him the poor sixpence 25 
a-day, and served zealously as a volunteer. Let us 
not grudge him this last luxury of his existence ; 
let him not have appealed to us in vain! The 
money was not necessary to him; he struggled 
through without it: long since, these guineas 30 



BURNS 113 

would have been gone ; and now the high-minded- 
ness of refusing them will plead for him in all 
hearts forever. 

We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns 's life; 

5 for matters had now taken such a shape with him 
as could not long continue. If improvement was 
not to be looked for, Nature could only for a limited 
time maintain this dark and maddening warfare 
against the world and itself. We are not medically 

10 informed whether any continuance of years was, 
at this period, probable for Burns; whether his 
death is to be looked on as in some sense an 
accidental event, or only as the natural consequence 
of the long series of events that had preceded. The 

15 latter seems to be the likelier opinion ; and yet it is 
by no means a certain one. At all events, as we 
have said, some change could not be very distant. 
Three gates of deliverance, it seems to us, were 
open for Burns : clear poetical activity ; madness ; 

20 or death. The first, with longer life, was still 
possible, though not probable , for physical causes 
were beginning to be concerned in it; and yet 
Burns had an iron resolution; could he but have 
seen and felt, that not only his highest glory, but 

25 his first duty, and the true medicine for all his 
woes, lay here. The second was still less probable ; 
for his mind was ever among the clearest and firm- 
est. So the milder third gate was opened for him ; 
and he passed, not softly, yet speedily, into that 

30 still country where the hailstorms and fire-showers 



114 CARLYLE'S 

do not reach, and the heaviest-laden wayfarer at 
length lays down his load ! 

Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how 
he sank unaided by any real help, uncheered by 
any wise sympathy, generous minds have sometimes 5 
figured to themselves, with a reproachful sorrow, 
that much might have been done for him ; that by 
counsel, true affection, and friendly ministrations, 
he might have been saved to himself and the world. 
We question whether there is not more tenderness 10 
of heart than soundness of judgment in these 
suggestions. It seems dubious to us whether the 
richest, wisest, most benevolent individual could 
have lent Burns any effectual help. Counsel, 
which seldom profits any one, he did not need ; in 15 
his understanding, he knew the right from the 
wrong, as well perhaps as any man ever did ; but 
the persuasion which would have availed him, lies 
not so much in the head as in the heart, where no 
argument or expostulation could have assisted 20 
much to implant it. As to money again, we do 
not believe that this was his essential want ; or well 
see how any private man could, even presupposing 
Burns 's consent, have bestowed on him an 
independent fortune, with much prospect of 25 
decisive advantage. It is a mortifying truth, that 
two men, in any rank of society, could hardly be 
found virtuous enough to give money, and to take 
it as a necessary gift, without injury to the moral 



BURNS 115 

entireness of one or both. But so stands the fact: 
Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no 
longer exists; except in the cases of kindred or 
other legal affinity, it is in reality no longer 

5 expected, or recognized as a virtue among men. 
A close observer of manners has pronounced "Pat- 
ronage," that is, pecuniary or other economic fur- 
therance, to be "twice cursed;" cursing him that 
gives, and him that takes! And thus, in regard to 

10 outward matters also it has become the rule, as in 
regard to inward it always was and must be the rule, 
that no one shall look for effectual help to another ; 
but that each shall rest contented with what help he 
can afford himself. Such, we say, is the principle 

is of modern Honour ; naturally enough growing out 
of that sentiment of Pride, which we inculcate and 
encourage as the basis of our whole social morality. 
Many a poet has been poorer than Burns ; but no 
one was ever prouder: we may question whether, 

20 without great precautions, even a pension from 
Boyalty would not have galled and encumbered, 
more than actually assisted him. 

Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with 
another class of Burns 's admirers,' who accuse the 

25 higher ranks among us of having mined Burns by 
their selfish neglect of nim. "We have already 
stated our doubts whether direct pecuniary help, 
had it been offered, would have been accepted, or 
could have proved very effectual. We shall readily 

30 admit, however, that much was to be done for 



116 CARLYLE'S 

Burns; that many a poisoned arrow might have 
been warded from his bosom ; many an entangle- 
ment in his path, cut asunder by the hand of the 
powerful; and light and heat, shed on him from 
high places, would have made his humble atmos- 5 
phere more genial; and the softest heart then 
breathing might have lived and died with some 
fewer pangs. Nay, we shall grant farther, and for 
Burns it is granting much, that, with all his pride, 
he would have thanked, even with exaggerated 10 
gratitude, any one who had cordially befriended 
him : patronage, unless once cursed, needed not to 
have been twice so. At all events, the poor pro- 
motion he desired in his calling might have been 
granted : it was his own scheme, therefore likelier 15 
than any other to be of service. All this it might 
have been a luxury, nay, it was a duty, for our 
nobility to have done. ~No part of all this, however, 
did any of them do; or apparently attempt, or wish 
to do : so much is granted against them. But what 20 
then is the amount of their blame? Simply that 
they were men of the world, and walked by the prin- 
ciples of such men; that they treated Burns, as 
other nobles and other commoners had done other 
poets; as the English did Shakspeare; as King 25 
Charles and his Cavaliers did Butler, as King Philip 
and his Grandees did Cervantes. Do men gather 
grapes of thorns ; or shall we cut down our thorns 
for yielding only a fence and haws? How, indeed, 
could the "nobility and gentry of his native land" 30 



BURNS 117 

hold out any help to this " Scottish Bard, proud of 
his name and country''? Were the nobility and 
gentry so much as able rightly to help themselves? 
Had they not their game to preserve ; their borough 

5 interests to strengthen; dinners, therefore, of vari- 
ous kinds to eat and give? Were their means more 
than adequate to all this business, or less than 
adequate? Less than adequate, in general ; few of 
them in reality were richer than Burns ; many of 

10 them were poorer ; for sometimes they had to wring 
their supplies, as with thumbscrews, from the hard 
hand, and, in their need of guineas, to forget their 
duty of mercy : which Burns was never reduced to 
do. Let us pity and forgive them. The game they 

is preserved and shot, the dinners they ate and gave, 
the borough interests they strengthened, the little 
Babylons they severally builded by the glory of 
their might, are all melted or melting back into 
the primeval Chaos, as man's merely selfish 

20 endeavours are fated to do: and here was an 
action, extending, in virtue of its worldly influ- 
ence, we may say, through all time; in virtue of 
its moral nature, beyond all time, being immortal 
as the Spirit of Goodness itself; this action was 

25 offered them to do, and light was not given them 
to do it. Let us pity and forgive them. But 
better than pity, let us go and do otherwise. 
Human suffering did not end with the life of 
Burns; neither was the solemn mandate, "Love 

30 one another, bear one another's burdens," given to 



118 CARLYLE'S 

the rich only, but to all men. True, we shall find 
no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our aid or our 
pity; but celestial natures, groaning under the 
fardels of a weary life, we shall still find ; and that 
wretchedness which Fate has rendered voiceless 5 
and tuneless, is not the least wretched, but the most. 
Still, we do not think that the blame of Burns 's 
failure lies chiefly with the world. The world, it 
seems to us, treated him with more, rather than 
with less, kindness than it usually shows to such 10 
men. ^It has ever, we fear, shown but small favour 
to its Teachers: hunger and nakedness, perils and 
revilings, the prison, the cross, the poison-chalice, 
have, in most times and countries, been the 
market-price it has offered for Wisdom, the welcome 15 
with which it has greeted those who have come to 
enlighten and purify. ] Homer and Socrates, and 
the Christian Apostles, belong to old days; but the 
world's Martyrology was not completed with these. 
Eoger Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly dun- 20 
geons; Tasso pines in the cell of a madhouse; 
Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lisbon. 
So neglected, so "persecuted they the Prophets," 
not in Juclea only, but in all places where men 
have been. We reckon that every poet of Burns 's 25 
order is, or should be, a prophet and teacher to 
his age; that he has no right to expect great kind- 
ness from it, but rather is bound to do it great 
kindness; that Burns, in particular, experienced 
fully the usual proportion of the world's goodness; 30 



BURNS 119 

and that the blame of his failure, as we have said, 
lies not chiefly with the world. 

Where, then, does it lie? We are forced to 
answer: With himself; it is his inward, not his 
5 outward, misfortunes that bring him to the dust. 
Seldom, indeed, is it otherwise; seldom is a life 
morally wrecked but the grand cause lies in some 
internal mal -arrangement, some want less of good 
fortune than of good guidance. Nature fashions 

10 no creature without implanting in it the strength 
needful for its action and duration; least of all 
does she so neglect her masterpiece and darling, 
the poetic soul. Neither can we believe that it is 
in the power of any external circumstances utterly 

is to ruin the mind of a man ; nay, if proper wisdom 
be given him, even so much as to affect its essential 
health and beauty. The sternest sum-total of all 
worldly misfortunes is Death; nothing more can 
lie in the cup of human w r oe : yet many men, in all 

20 ages, have triumphed over Death, and led it 
captive; converting its physical victory into a 
moral victory for themselves, into a seal and 
immortal consecration for all that their past life 
had achieved. What has been done, may be done 

25 again : nay, it is but the degree and not the kind 
of such heroism that differs in different seasons; 
for without some portion of this spirit, not of 
boisterous daring, but of silent fearlessness, of 
Self-denial in all its forms, no good man, in any 

30 scene or time, has ever attained to be good. 



120 CARLYLE'S 

We have already stated the error of Burns ; and 
mourned over it, rather than blamed it. It was 
the want of unity in his purposes, of consistency in 
his aims ; the hapless attempt to mingle in friendly 
union the common spirit of the world with the 5 
spirit of poetry, which is of a far different and 
altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns was 
nothing wholly ; and Burns could be nothing, no 
man formed as he was can be anything, by halves. 
The heart, not of a mere hot-blooded, popular 10 
Versemonger, or poetical Restaurateur, but of a 
true Poet and Singer, worthy of the old religious 
heroic times, had been given him: and he fell 
in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of 
scepticism, selfishness, and triviality, when true 15 
Nobleness was little understood, and its place 
supplied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren 
and unfruitful principle of Pride. The influences 
of that age, his open, kind, susceptible nature, to 
say nothing of his highly untoward situation, made 20 
it more than usually difficult for him to cast aside, 
or rightly subordinate ; the better spirit that was 
within him ever sternly demanded its rights, its 
supremacy : he spent his life in endeavouring to 
reconcile these two; and lost it, as he must lose it, 25 
without reconciling them. 

Burns was born poor ; and born also to continue 
poor, for he would not endeavour to be otherwise : 
this it had been well could he have once for all 
admitted, and considered as finally settled. He 30 



BURNS 121 

was poor, truly; but hundreds even of his own 
class and order of minds have been poorer, yet have 
suffered nothing deadly from it: nay, his own 
Father had a far sorer battle with ungrateful 

5 destiny than his was ; and he did not yield to it, but 
died courageously warring, and to all moral intents 
prevailing, against it. True, Burns had little 
means, had even little time for poetry, his only 
real pursuit and vocation ; but so much the more 

10 precious was what little he had. In all these 
external respects his case was hard; but very far 
from the hardest. Poverty, incessant drudgery. 
and much worse evils, it has often been the lot of 
Poets and wise men to strive with, and their glory 

is to conquer. Locke was banished as a traitor ; and 
wrote his Essay on the Human Understanding 
sheltering himself in a Dutch garret. Was Milton 
rich or at his ease when he composed Paradise 
Lost? Not only low, but fallen from a height; 

20 not only poor, but impoverished ; in darkness and 
with dangers compassed round, he sang his immor- 
tal song, and found fit audience, though few. Did 
not Cervantes finish his work, a maimed soldier 
and in prison? Nay, was not the Araucana, which 

25 Spain acknowledges as its Epic, written without 
even the aid of paper ; on scraps of leather, as the 
stout fighter and voyager snatched any moment 
from that wild warfare? 

And what, then, had these men, which Burns 

30 wanted? Two things; both which, it seems to us, 



122 CARLYLE'S 

are indispensable for sucli men. They had a true, 
religious principle of morals; and a single, not a 
double aim in their activity. They were not self- 
seekers and self - worshipers ; but seekers and 
worshipers of something far better than Self. 5 
Not personal enjoyment was their object; but a 
high, heroic idea of Eeligion, of Patriotism, of 
heavenly Wisdom, in one or the other form, ever 
hovered before them ; in which cause they neither 
shrank from suffering, nor called on the earth to 10 
witness it as something wonderful; but patiently 
endured, counting it blessedness enough so to spend 
and be spent. Thus the "golden-calf of Self-love," 
however curiously carved, was not their Deity; 
but the Invisible Goodness, which alone is man's 15 
reasonable service. This feeling was as a celestial 
fountain, whose streams refreshed into gladness 
and beauty all the provinces of their otherwise too 
desolate existence. In a word, they willed one 
thing, to which all other things were subordinated 20 
and made subservient ; and therefore they accom- 
plished it. The wedge will rend rocks; but its 
edge must be sharp and single : if it be double, the 
wedge is bruised in pieces, and will rend nothing. 

Part of this superiority these men owed to their 25 
age ; in which heroism and devotedness were still 
practised, or at least not yet disbelieved in ; but much 
of it likewise they owed to themselves. With 
Burns, again, it was different. His morality, in 
most of its practical points, is that of a mere worldly 30 



BURNS 123 

man; enjoyment, in a finer or coarser shape, is the 
only thing he longs and strives for. A noble instinct 
sometimes raises him above this; but an instinct 
only, and acting only for moments. He has no 
5 Religion; in the shallow age where his days were 
cast, Religion was not discriminated from the 
New and Old Light forms of Religion; and was, 
with these, becoming obsolete in the minds of 
men. His heart, indeed, is alive with a trembling 

10 adoration, but there is no temple in his under- 
standing. He lives in darkness and in the shadow 
of doubt. His religion, at best, is an anxious wish ; 
like that of Rabelais, "a great Perhaps." 

He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart ; could 

15 he but have loved it purely, and with his whole undi- 
vided heart, it had been well. For Poetry, as 
Burns could have followed it, is but another form 
of Wisdom, of Religion; is itself Wisdom and 
Religion. But this also was denied him. His 

20 poetry is a stray vagrant gleam, which will not be 
extinguished within him, yet rises not to be the 
true light of his path, but is often a wildfire that 
misleads him. It was not necessary for Burns to 
be rich; to be, or to seem, "independent:" but it 

25 was necessary for him to be at one with his own 
heart; to place what was highest in his nature 
highest also in his life: "to seek within himself for 
that consistency and sequence, which external events 
would forever refuse him." He was born a poet; 

30 poetry was the celestial element of his being, and 



124 CARLYLES 

should have been the soul of his whole endeavours. 
Lifted into that serene ether, whither he had wings 
given him to mount, he would have needed no other 
elevation : poverty, neglect, and all evil save the des- 
ecration of himself and his Art, were a small matter 5 
to him ; the pride and the passions of the world 
lay far beneath his feet ; and he looked down alike on 
noble and slave, on prince and beggar, and all that 
wore the stamp of man, with clear recognition, 
with brotherly affection, with sympathy, with pity. 10 
Nay, we question whether, for his culture as a 
Poet, poverty and much suffering for a season were 
not absolutely advantageous. Great men in looking 
back over their lives, have testified to that effect. 
"I would not for much," says Jean Paul, "that 15 
I had been born richer." And yet Paul's birth 
was poor enough; for, in another place, he adds: 
"The prisoner's allowance is bread and water; and 
I had often only the latter." But the gold that 
is refined in the hottest furnace comes out the 20 
purest; or, as he has himself expressed it, "the 
canary-bird sings sweeter the longer it has been 
trained in a darkened cage." 

A man like Burns might have divided his hours 
between poetry and virtuous industry; industry 25 
which all true feeling sanctions, nay, prescribes, 
and which has a beauty, for that cause, beyond the 
pomp of thrones : but to divide his hours between 
poetry and rich men's banquets was an ill-starred 
and inauspicious attempt. How could he be at ease 30 



BURNS 125 

at such banquets? What had he to do there, min- 
gling his music with the coarse roar of altogether 
earthly voices; brightening the thick smoke of in- 
toxication with fire lent him from heaven? Was it 
5 his aim to enjoy life ? Tomorrow he must go drudge 
as an Exciseman ! We wonder not that Burns became 
moody, indignant, and at times an offender against 
certain rules of society ; but rather that he did not 
grow utterly frantic, and run amuck against them 

10 all. How could a man, so falsely placed, by his 
own or others' fault, ever know contentment or 
peaceable diligence for an hour? What he did, 
under such perverse guidance, and what he forbore 
to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the 

15 natural strength and worth of his character. 

Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverse- 
ness ; but not in others ; only in himself ; least of 
all in simple increase of wealth and worldly 
"respectability." We hope we have now heard 

20 enough about the efficacy of wealth for poetry, 
and to make poets happy. ISTay, have we not seen 
another instance of it in these very days? Byron, 
a man of an endowment considerably less ethereal 
than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a 

25 Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer: tne 
highest worldly honours, the fairest worldly career, 
are his by inheritance ; the richest harvest of fame 
he soon reaps, in another province, by his own 
hand. And what does all this avail him? Is he 

30 happy, is he good, is he true ? Alas, he has a 



126 CARLYLE'S 

poet's soul, and strives towards the Infinite and the 
Eternal ; and soon feels that all this is but mount- 
ing to the house-top to reach the stars! Like 
Burns, he is only a proud man; might, like him, 
have "purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to study 5 
the character of Satan;" for Satan also is Byron's 
grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and the model 
apparently of his conduct. As in Burns 's case, 
too, the celestial element will not mingle with the 
clay of earth ; both poet and man of the world he 10 
must not be ; vulgar Ambition will not live kindly 
with poetic Adoration; he cannot serve God and 
Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is not happy; nay, 
he is the most wretched of all men. His life is 
falsely arranged: the fire that is in him is not a 15 
strong, still, central fire, warming into beauty the 
products of a world; but it is the mad fire of a 
volcano ; and now — we look sadly into the ashes of 
a crater, which ere long will fill itself with snow ! 

Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries 20 
to their generation, to teach it a higher Doctrine, a 
purer Truth ; they had a message to deliver, which 
left them no rest till it was accomplished ; in dim 
throes of pain, this divine behest lay smouldering 
within them; for they knew not what it meant, 25 
and felt it only in mysterious anticipation; and 
they had to die without articulately uttering it. 
They are in the camp of the Unconverted ; yet not 
as high messengers of rigorous though benignant 
truth, but as soft flattering singers, and in pleasant 30 



BURNS 127 

fellowship, will they live there: they are first 
adulated, then persecuted; they accomplish little 
for others ; they find no peace for themselves, but 
only death and the peace of the grave. We con- 
5 fess, it is not without a certain mournful awe that 
we view the fate of these noble souls, so richly 
gifted, yet ruined to so little purpose with all their 
gifts. It seems to us there is a stern moral taught 
in this piece of history, — twice told us in our own 

10 time ! Surely to men of like genius, if there be any 
such, it carries with it a lesson of deep, impress- 
ive significance. Surely it would become such a 
man, furnished for the highest of all enterprises, 
that of being the Poet of his Age, to consider well 

is what it is that he attempts, and in what spirit he 
attempts it. For the words of Milton are true in 
all times, and were never truer than in this: "He 
who would write heroic poems must make his 
whole life a heroic poem." If he cannot first so 

20 make his life, then let him hasten from this arena; 
for neither its lofty glories, nor its fearful perils, 
are for him. Let him dwindle into a modish 
balladmonger ; let him worship and besing the idols 
of the time, and the time will not fail to reward 

25 him. If, indeed, he can endure to live in that 
capacity! Byron and Burns could not live as 
idol-priests, but the fire of their own hearts con- 
sumed them ; and better it was for them that they 
could not. For it is not in the favour of the great 

30 or of the small, but in a life of truth, and in the 



128 CARLYLE'S 

inexpugnable citadel of his own soul, that a Byron's 
or a Burns 's strength must lie. Let the great 
stand aloof from him, or know how to reverence 
him. Beautiful is the union of wealth with favour 
and furtherance for literature; like the costliest 5 
flower-jar enclosing the loveliest amaranth. Yet let 
not the relation be mistaken. A true poet is not 
one whom they can hire by money or flattery to be a 
minister of their pleasures, their writer of occasional 
verses, their purveyor of table- wit; he cannot be 10 
their menial, he cannot even be their partisan. At 
the peril of both parties, let no such union be 
attempted ! Will a Courser of the Sun work softly 
in the harness of a Dray-horse ? His hoofs are of 
fire, and his path is through the heavens, bringing 15 
light to all lands ; will he lumber on mud high- 
ways, dragging ale for earthly appetites from door 
to door ? 

But we must stop short in these considerations, 
which would lead us to boundless lengths. We 20 
had something to say on the public moral character 
of Burns ; but this also we must forbear. We are 
far from regarding him as guilty before the world, as 
guiltier than the average ; nay, from doubting that 
he is less guilty than one of ten thousand. Tried 25 
at a tribunal far more rigid than that where the 
Plebiscita of common civic reputations are pro- 
nounced, he has seemed to us even there less 
worthy of blame than of pity and wonder. But the 
world is habitually unjust in its judgments of such so 



BURNS 129 

men; unjust on many grounds, of which this one 
may be stated as the substance: It decides, like a 
court of law, by dead statutes ; and not positively 
but negatively, less on what is done right, than on 
5 what is or is not done wrong. Not the few inches 
of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which 
are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the 
whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. 
This orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the 

10 breadth of the solar system ; or it may be a city 
hippodrome; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its 
diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of 
deflection only are measured : and it is assumed that 
the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the 

is planet, will yield the same ratio when compared 
with them ! Here lies the root of many a blind, 
cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, 
which one never listens to with approval. Granted 
the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and 

20 tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has 
not been all -wise and all-powerful: bat to know 
how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage 
has been round the Globe, or only to Ramsgate and 
the Isle of Dogs. 

25 With our readers in general, with men of right 
feeling anywhere, we are not required to plead for 
Burns. In pitying admiration he lies enshrined 
in all our hearts, in a far nobler mausoleum than 
that one of marble; neither will his Works, even 

so as they are, pass away from the memory of men. 



130 BURNS 

While the Shakspeares and Miltons roll on like 
mighty rivers through the country of Thought, 
bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl- 
fishers on their waves ; this little Valclusa Fountain 
will also arrest our eye: for this also is of Nature's 5 
own and most cunning workmanship, bursts from 
the depths of the earth, with a full gushing 
current, into the light of day ; and often will the 
traveler turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and 
muse among its rocks and pines ! 10 




NOTES 

Proper names easily found in biographical dictionaries 
are not given in the Notes or the Glossary, since the 
meager references possible here would be of little value. 
The few names which the student cannot readily find are 
inserted in the Glossary; all others the student should 
look up for himself. He will find sufficient material in any 
encyclopaedia, or in the Century Cyclopaedia of Names. 



Page 43, Line 4. Maxim of supply arid demand. 
Carlyle and Ruskin are one in denouncing Mill and his 
school of economists, insisting that the less capable should 
be protected against the miseries arising from free com- 
petition and from changes m methods of production. 

As a matter of fact, Hargreaves, the inventor of the 
spinning-jenny, died, like Butler, the author of Hudibras, 
in poverty. 

P. 43, Ij. 16. Brave mausoleum. Burns lies at Dumfries 
under a tomb of Grecian design, adorned with pillars and 
surmounted by an unfortunate tin dome. Within is a 
marble group representing the genius of Scotland throw- 
ing the mantle of inspiration about the poetic husband- 
man as he stands by his plough. Carlyle passed by this 
tomb many a time. 

P. 46, Li. 27. Constable's Miscellany. Archibald Constable 
ought to be remembered by the student. He was the orig- 
inal publisher of the Edinburgh Review, the first and ablest of 
the periodicals which characterize the early half of the cen- 
tury ; he brought out the notable fifth and sixth editions of 
the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He published many of Sir Walter 
Scott's works ; also Constable's Miscellany, a series of stand- 
ard works which set the pace for future publishers of popu- 
lar editions. Constable stood for large ideas and strong 
131 



132 NOTES 

thought in his books, and for liberal compensation to authors 
and adequate returns from large sales, rather than high 
prices. Through the mismanagement of others his busi- 
ness affairs became entangled, and his immense estab- 
lishment fell with a crash, involving Scott to the extent of 
£130,000. This greatest of British publishers died broken- 
hearted, about a year before this essay appeared. 

P. 47, Li. 21. Our notions . . . appear extravagant. 
. . . Our own contributions . . . scanty and feeble. It 
has been cleverly suggested that these and similar apolo- 
getic expressions were interpolated by Francis Jeffrey, 
editor of the Review. Apology was certainly far from 
characteristic of Carlyle, and we learn from his Life by 
Froude that when the proof sheets came home from 
Jeffrey he found "the first part cut all into shreds — the 
body of a quadruped with the head of a bird, " and although 
Carlyle successfully insisted that the wording of the manu- 
script should be restored on penalty of cancelling the 
article, he evidently alludes to this and similar experi- 
ences, in his letter to Emerson, when he speaks of "edi- 
torial blotches too, notes of admiration, dashes, * we 
thinks,' etc., etc., common in Jeffrey's time in the Edin- 
burgh Review." 

P. 49, Li. 18. Without model. Carlyle underestimates the 
sources of Burns's poetic inspiration. Andrew Lang, the 
keenest and best-balanced student of Burns now writing, 
says: "He was the most imitative of all men of poetic 
genius," and again: "In him Folk Song and Folk 
Romance, never wholly extinct, become consciously artis- 
tic. He is not in poetry an innovator, but a ' continuator.' 
He always has a model in the music and the lyrics of the 
people, in the humour and the measures of Lindsay and 
Dunbar, in the passion of the ballad singers." 

P. 50, Li. 6. Most disadvantageous. Quite the contrary 
— one not born of the people could never have become the 
poet of the people. On this point Jeffrey says: "Burns 
was placed in a situation more favorable, perhaps, to the 
development of great poetical talents than any other which 
could have been assigned him." 



NOTES 133 

P. 50, Li. 12. Rhymes of a Ferguson. Speaking- again 
of Burns's indebtedness, Andrew Lang pithily says: 
" Fergusson he always acknowledged with equal justice 
and generosity as his Master. Burns is not one of the 
poets who fare quo nulla priorum vestigia. He almost always 
climbs by a trodden way, pursuing the track of a prede- 
cessor. But his genius, like a forest fire, obliterates the 
traces of other and earlier footsteps, so that his country- 
men have more than half forgotten that true and rare 
genius, his predecessor, Fergusson." 

P. 51, Li. 8. Exposition. It is the province of the 
essayist to advance certain statements of importance and 
to make their meaning clear. He desires to present his 
views so positively and forcibly that they shall become 
the opinions of others. This is what Carlyle means by 
exposition. While he by no means confines himself strictly 
to this form of discourse, Carlyle's larger thoughts, be 
they correct or otherwise, should be sought in each para- 
graph. The student may for instance locate several 
prominent statements in this paragraph ; reflection will 
enable him to select two or three as the more important ; 
close thinking will arrive at the one thing Carlyle would 
have us understand forever. Search for this central line 
of thought ; grasp the central thought firmly, let all else 
fall away; then go forward to the next paragraph. Do 
this to the end of the essay. 

P. 53, L. 5. The "Daisy." The reference is to Burns's 
poem To a Mountain Daisy, which, with that To a Mouse, 
should be freshly re-read to give an understanding of 
this paragraph. 

P. 53, Li. 14. Him that ivalketh. Ps. civ. 

P. 53, Li. 30. Straw roof. To an American in a land 
of fine timber and cheap shingles, a straw roof has a 
thought of shiftlessness or poverty; to a Scotchman in a 
country of cheap labor and fine building stone, a wooden 
or frame house seems an unsubstantial makeshift. The 
thatches of Ayrshire were made of long, straight, clean 
straw, placed by a skilled workman, as carefully as a 



134 NOTES 

carpenter would lay shingles. A well-thatched roof was 
considered comfortable. 

P. 55, Li. 8. Ho fitter business. A gaugership, a collec- 
torship of excise, a position not differing- essentially from 
that held by a deputy collector of internal revenue in this 
country, yet involving the collection of minor and aggra- 
vating taxes. If a housewife rendered out a cake of mut- 
ton tallow, Burns had to be on hand to weigh and tax it. 
If home-made ale were brewed he had to be on hand to 
gauge it and collect the trifling but exasperating duty. 
For his views read The DeiVs awa wV the Exciseman. 

P. 55, Li. 25. The full collection of his strength. It is a 
question whether the cast of mind capable of carrying 
out an extended project such as Paradise Lost could have 
produced the "mere occasional effusions" on which the 
reputation of Burns rests and which the world could ill 
spare. Carlyle returns to this point on page 94, where he 
conjectures the probable effect of a university training. 

P. 56, Li. 24. Sincerity. Compare Matthew Arnold: 
"The end and aim of all literature is a criticism of life." 
" Truth and seriousness of substance and matter, felicity 
and perfection of diction and manner, as these are 
exhibited in the best poets, are what institute a criticism 
of life made in conformity with the laws of poetic truth 
and poetic beauty." "The moment that we leave the 
small band of the very best poets, the true classics, and 
deal with poets of the next rank, we shall find that per- 
fect truth and seriousness of matter in close alliance with 
perfect truth and felicity of manner, is the rule no 
longer." 

P. 57, Li. 13. Horace 1 s rule. " Si vis me flere, dolendum 
est primum ipsi tibi." " If thou wouldst have me weep, thou 
must first feel grief thyself." 

P. 58, Li. 20. Byron. . . . his poetry . . . not 
true. We quote again from Matthew Arnold, taking the 
doubtful privilege of dropping out portions not needed 
here. "There is the Byron who posed, there is the Byron 
with his affectations and silliness. But when this theat- 



NOTES 135 

rical and easily criticised personage betook himself to 
poetry, and when he had fairly warmed to his work, then 
he became another man ; then the theatrical personage 
passed away : then a higher power took possession of him, 
and filled him." 

P. 60, L. 6. Poetry . . . which he had time to medi- 
tate. Compai'e this thought with poured forth with little pre- 
meditation. 

P. 61, L. 13. Mrs. Dunlop. An estimable lady who 
was so pleased with the Cotters Saturday Night that 
she sent a messenger sixteen miles to Mossgiel with a 
note of appreciation. An exchange of letters and an hon- 
orable friendship followed. It is not strange that Burns's 
letters to Mrs. Dunlop should have been free and in a 
happy vein. This is the lady whose housekeeper returned 
a copy of the above mentioned poem with the remark: 
"Gentlemen and ladies may think muckle of this; but for 
me it's naething but what I saw in my faither's hoose 
every day, an' I dinna see hoo he could hae tell't it ony 
ither way." 

P. 61, L. 29. Rose-coloured Novels. Carlyle held an 
unfavorable opinion of fiction both in prose and romantic 
verse. He was correspondingly out of sorts with a liter- 
ary age in which the novel gained, we may say, an ascen- 
dency. For his Virguis of Hie Sim we shall not go far 
wrong if we look into Moore's Lalla Rookh (1817) ; for 
Knights of the Cross and malicious Saracens in turbans we turn 
naturally to Scott's Ivanhoe (1819), and Talisman (1825); 
copper-coloured chiefs in wampum were doubtless sug'gested 
by Cooper's Leather Stocking Tales. 

P. 62, L. 30. The poet. In this and the preceding 
passage we must enlarge our ordinary idea of poet, for in 
the largest sense the poet is not necessarily a writer or 
framer of verse, nor even a writer at all, but an imagina- 
tive thinker. Note Carlyle's definition at the close of this 
paragraph. Read Lowell's Ode, which contains a parallel 
thought. 

P. 63, L. 14. The fifth act of a Tragedy. The closing act. 



136 NOTES 

P. 65, li. 11. Such cobweb i speculations. In a similar 
review article on Milton, contributed likewise to the 
Edinburgh Review^ just three years and three months 
earlier, Macaulay says: "We think that as civilization 

advances, poetry almost necessarily declines 

In proportion as men know more and think more, they 
look less at individuals, and more at classes. They, there- 
fore, make better theories and worse poems." A spirited 
discussion arose and Carlyle here throws in a few sentences 
for Macaulay's especial comfort. 

P. 66, Li. 1. No Theocritus till Burns. A famous Greek 

poet, of Syracuse, 3rd century B. C, who wrote "charming 

little pictures of life." A word from Stedman and his 

translation of a bit from the Greek may serve to fix 

the reference in mind: "Theocritus created his own 

school, with no models except those obtainable from the 

popular mimes and catches of his own region; just as 

{Burns, availing himself of the simple Scottish ballads, 

„i»\ lifted the poetry of Scotland to an eminent and winsome 

^Individuality." 

The red cicalas ceaselessly amid 

The shady boughs were chirping ; from afar 
The tree-frog in the briars chanted shrill; 

The crest-larks and the thistle-finches sang, 
The turtle dove was plaining; tawny bees 

Were Severing round the fountain. All things near 
Smelt of the ripened summer, all things smelt 

Of fruit-time. Pears were rolling at our feet, 
And apples for the taking; to the ground 

The plum-tree staggered, burdened with its fruit; 
And we, meanwhile, brushed from a wine-jar's mouth 
The pitch four years unbroken. 

— The Thalysia. Theocritus, VII., l, 2. 

Compare Whittier's Among the Hills. 

P. 67, Li. 20. Of this last excellence. This apt para- 
graph with its three quotations must have been an after- 
thought, as it does not appear in the original Review article. 

P. 69, Li. 14. " The pale Moon." This passage from 
Open the Door to Me, Oh! is evidently the worse for quoting. 
The verse should read. 



NOTES 137 

The wan moon is setting behind the white wave 

And time is setting wi' me, oh! 
False friends, false love, farewell! for mair 

I'll ne'er trouble them, nor thee, oh ! 

P. 70, L. 14. We hear of a gentleman. Burns wrote 
the Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson, " a gentleman 
who held the patent for his Honors immediately from 
Almighty God.'' Jane Baillie Welsh, writing to a friend in 
1826 just before her marriage to Carlyle, uses thisi state- 
ment in alluding to his peasant origin. The letter fell into 
Carlyle's hands after her death and touched him deeply. 

P. 71, Li. 5. Poetry, except in such cases. Jeffrey 
evidently thought this sentence not only an injustice 
to Keats, but also likely to reflect upon Carlyle. It first 
appeared in the following softened form in The Review: 
" Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the 
whole consists in extreme sensibility, and a certain vague 
pervading tunefulness of nature, is no separate faculty, 
no organ which can be superadded to the rest or disjoined 
from them ; but rather the result of their general har- 
mony and completion." Carlyle upon the publication of 
his collected essays restored the original sentence. 

P. 75, L. 20. But has it not been said. This and the 
paragraph following were also inserted by the author at a 
later date. 

P. 77, L. 1. Since all know of it. Note the shade of 
meaning conveyed by the word of, which was also an 
afterthought inserted when the essay was revised. 

P. 77, Ii. 6. Forbore to speak. The Galloway journey 
on horseback with Mr. Syme is well attested, but the 
composition of Bruce's Address, under the circumstances 
given, is discredited on excellent authority. 

P. SO, L. 26. The Jolly Beggars. This paragraph is 
without meaning unless the poem itself be read. 

P. 82, L. 9. A small aperture. Connect this expres- 
sion in thought with brief in the next line, not with the 
number of Burns's songs. 



138 NOTES 

P. 82, li. 24. Wine-bred madrigals. Carlyle is hitting 
away again at Keats, Shelley and their contemporaries. 

P. 86, Li. 9. At Geneva. There is this difference : The 
Edinburgh writers were natives who imported foreign 
literature and foreign ideas, while the writers of Geneva 
were foreigners attracted from all Europe by the free 
atmosphere of the Swiss city. 

P. 88, Li. 10. " Doctrine of Rent." A theory put forth 
by Adam Smith, a professor in the University of Glas- 
gow. His Wealth of Nations is considered the foundation of 
the science of political economy. Smith taught that true 
rent is the value of the product less the cost of production. 
According to this theory if a cultivator sell his crop for 
one hundred dollars, while the cost of raising and market- 
ing the crop, including labor, is sixty-five dollars, the rent 
is thirty-five dollars, whether the cultivator pay the land' 
holder twenty dollars or forty dollars or nothing at all for 
the use of the land. 

P. 88, Xi. 11. " Natural History of Religion." A treatise 
by David Hume, the author of a history of England and 
of other noted works. He held various official positions, 
but was repeatedly unsuccessful as an applicant for a pro- 
fessorship in the University of Glasgow. His writings 
and friendship powerfully influenced Adam Smith. 

P. 88, Li. 23. Racy virtues of the soil. This literature 
of the soil has a new growth in the writings of Stevenson, 
Barrie,gWatson and Crockett, who have heeded the maxim 
laid down by Carlyle. See page 61 et seq. 

P. 89, Li. 18. "A wish," etc. Quoted from the Epistle 
to the Guidwife of Wauchope House. Let breast rhyme with 
least, and bear with dear. For weeding clix>s Currie says weed- 
ing -heuk, and Manson saj-s weeder-clips . 

P. 89, L. 30. Far more interesting . Surely a bit of one- 
sided intensity. Knowledge of the author's life lends 
interest to his works, but is not our interest in an author 
almost entirely due to the celebrity of his works ? We 
have only to consider whether we could least afford to 
spare Burns's biography or Burns's poems. 



NOTES 139 

P. 92, Li. 17. This blessing. Singleness of aim and 
contentment in its attainment. Carlyle, least of all, ever 
got his own bearings. 

P. 93, Li. 28. The crossing of a brook. Caesar's cross- 
ing 1 the Rubicon. 

P. 94, L. 5. Changed the whole course of British Literature. 
The following- comment could hardly be improved: 

" I have not made much lament for the poverty of Burns. 
He had, probably, about as much schooling" as Shake- 
speare; he had the best education for his genius. Better 
Scots poetry he could not have written had he been an 
Ireland scholar; and his business was to write Scots 
poetry. The people of whom he came he could not have 
represented as he did, if a long classical education and 
and many academic years had come between him and the 
clay bigging of his birth. He could not have bettered 
Tarn CShanter, or Hallow E' 'en, or The Jolly Beggars, if he had 
been steeped in Longinus and Quintilian, Dr. Blair his 
rhetoric, and the writings of Boileau. A man's work, 
after all, is what he could do and had to do. One fails to 
see how any change of worldly circumstance could have 
bettered the true work of Burns." — Andrew Lang. 

P. 94, Li. 9. Cheap school-system. For an idea of the 
interest the Scottish school-master takes in his bright boys, 
read an account of " Domsie" in The Bonnie Briar Bush. 
The difficulty in Burns's case was not the payment of a 
trifling tuition, but the need of his aid in the field. He 
was a large, active boy and became the mainstaj r of the 
family when others of his age were supposed to be in 
school. 

P. 95, Li. 13. Burns was happy. Carlyle has else- 
where made much of the drudgery of Burns's boyhood, 
but this sentence is more rational. It does not appear, 
although Burns thought he worked too hard, that his 
labor was any more severe than that of many an ordinary 
American boy. 

P. 98, Li. 17. Farewell to Scotland. The quotation is 
the concluding portion of Burns's Farewell Song to the 



140 NOTES 

Banks of Ayr. The last line should read: "Farewell the 
bonnie banks of Ayr." " I composed this song-," writes 
the poet, " as I conveyed my chest so far on my road to 
Greenock, where I was to embark in a few days for 
Jamaica. I meant it as my farewell dirge to my native 
land." 

P. 106, Li. 23. He owed no man. Not strictly true, as 
on more than one occasion the poet applied to friends for 
a loan: yet, in the main, the statement is just, for Burns 
dreaded a debt and at his death left few accounts unsettled. 

P. Ill, Ii. 2. Lady Baillie's ballad. These Scottish bal- 
lads are ruined unless the' rhyme of the Scots is pre- 
served. For instance brovj rhymes with new, as if spelled 
broo ; been rhymes with green, and die rhymes with lea, as if 
spelled dee. 

P 113, L. 27. Clearest and firmest. On the contrary, 
if Burns had possessed a character of even ordinary firm- 
ness he would have been more nearly able to live up to his 
ideals. Burns knew right from wrong as well as need be, 
b\ ,+ . for want of decision, oscillated between hilarity and 
remorse, between disgraceful sinning and abject repent- 
ance. 

P. 115, L. 6. Patronage. Until the Queen Anne period, 
the only way a man of letters could hope for a reasonable 
financial return for his labor, was to obtain patronage, that 
is to say, a gift or a pension from those of wealth or 
authority. The poet laureateship of England is a trace of 
patronage. Johnson's famous letter to Lord Chesterfield 
(1755), if it did not "ring the death knell," announced the 
serious illness and approaching end of literary alms- 
giving. We quote one passage, relating, as does indeed 
the entire letter, to his Dictionary : 

"Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited 
in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; 
during which time I have been pushing on my work 
through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and 
have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, with- 
out one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or 
one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for 



NOTES 141 

I never had a patron before. Is not a Patron, my Lord, 
one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling- for 
life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, 
encumbers him with help? The notice which you have 
been pleased to take of my labours had it been early, had 
been kind ; but it has been delayed until I am indifferent, 
and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart 
it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no 
very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no 
benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the pub- 
lic should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which 
Providence has enabled me to do for myself." 

P. 116, L. 13. The poor promotion. A supervisorship 
of customs, a membership in the Board of Excise Commis- 
sioners. 

P. 123, L. 4. He has no Religion. The author of the 
Cotter's Saturday Night had an essentially reverential nature. 
A master of ridicule, Burns nowhere ridicules the good; a 
thorn of perfect point in the side of the self-righteous, he 
is excelled by no poet in his admiration of honest piety. 
One cannot imagine that Burns ever laughed at a play- 
mate for saying his prayers, or that he could hear blas- 
phemy without shrinking. None would have resented 
more quickly than Carlyle, an intimation that Burns was 
an irreligious man, but he is right in that the poet lacked 
that fervid zeal, call it perhaps, partisanship, or better 
high resolve, that sends a man out determined that the 
right shall win. Buims's sympathies were on the side of 
right, but there is an unmistakable void in that he assumes 
no responsibility whatever, and he is to this extent irre- 
sponsible, without religion, though not irreverent. 

"His creed was not orthodox, indeed, but it was sincere: 
he never lost sight and touch of the spiritual.'' — Lang. 

"It must be admitted that in protesting against hypoc- 
risy he has occasionally been led beyond the limits pre- 
scribed by good taste. This, with other offences against 
decorum, which here and there disfigure his pages, can 
only be condoned by an appeal to the general tone of his 
writing, which is reverential." — Nichol. 



142 NOTES 

P. 126, Li. 19. Fill itself with snow. Byron had now been 
dead but four years. What does the essayist mean by 
snow? 

P. 127, L. 27. Idol-priests. Note the force ; priests unto 
idols, i.e. ministers to false standards. Carlyle is fond of 
newly-compounded words, a trick he may have from the 
Germans. 



GLOSSARY 

AND INDEX TO INTRODUCTION 



A'. All. 

A'-day. All day. 

Ae. One. 

Aiblins. Perhaps. 

Aitkkn, Margaret. P. 11 

Amang. Among. 

An'. And. 

Ance. Once 

Ane. One 

AXXANDALE, P. 13. 

Akaucana. A heroic poem in 
thirty-seven cantos, by the Span- 
ish poet Alonzo de Ercill a. It cele- 
brates the conquest of Arauco, a 
province of Chile, in which the 
author was one of the combatants. 
P. 121,1.24. 

Armour, Jean. P. 28. 

Auld. Old. 

Auld Brig. Bead The Brigs of Ayr, 
in part a spirited dialogue between 
the old bridge and the new bridge 
in process of erection. In the pas- 
sage quoted, the sprite bf the Auld 
Brig is speaking and prophesies 
the fall of the New Brig— not the 
Auld Brig as Carlyle has it. The 
New Brig became unsafe and was 
taken down in 1877. 

Auld Nickie ben. Old Nick. Ben 
denotes familiarity. 

Ayr. P. 23. 

Bear. Barley. 

Beastie. Diminutive of beast. 

Beggar's Opera and Beggar's 
Bush. The former by John Gay, 
the latter by Fletcher. Both are 



popular London plays represent- 
ing the kind of life described in 
the Jolly Beggars. P. 82, 1. 1. 
Bide. To endure. 
Bing. Heap. 

Blacklock, Doctor. See sketch 
of Burns's life (p. 27). Dr. Blaek- 
losk was a blind poet who de- 
pended on employing a university 
student to read to him. He was 
one of the first in Edinburgh to 
realize the value of Burns's Kil- 
marnock volume. P. 104, 1. 24. 
Bock'd. Disgorged. 
Bonnie. Beautiful. 
Boston, John. Carlyle evidently 
refers here to Thomas Boston, a 
noted Scottish Presbyterian di 
vine. He was the author of a large 
number of theological works 
which were extensively read. 
P. 86, 1. 13. 
Brats. Rags. 
Brattle. Onset. 
Brig. Bridge. 

Burin. An engraver's tool of tem- 
pered steel. P. 67, 1. 19. 
Burns. Brooks, streams. 
Burns, Robert. 
Birth of. P. 23. 
Early education. P. 24. 
Composes his first song. P. 24. 
Works as flaxdresser P. 25. 
Publishes his first volume. P. 27. 
Visits Edinburgh. P. 27. 
Marries Jean Armour. P. 28. 
Appointed exciseman. P. 28. 



143 



144 



GLOSSARY 



Removes to Dumfries. P. 28. 
Dies. P. 28. 

Burn-the-wind. For Burnewin, 
the blacksmith. 

Butler. See p. 131, note to p. 43, 
1.4. 

Cacus. A giant son of Vulcan, liv- 
ing among the hills on which 
Rome was built. He stole cattle 
from Hercules, and dragged them 
backward by their tails into his 
cave, so that their footsteps might 
not show the direction in which 
they had traveled. Hercules, how- 
ever, traced them by their lowing, 
and slew Cacus. The reference is, 
of course, to Macpherson, also a 
stealer of cattle. P. 77, 1. 20. 

Caird. Tinker. 

Caledonian Hunt. An aristocratic 
association of the nobility and 
gentry in and about Edinburgh, 
whose influence in social matters 
was decisive. P. 45, 1. 1. 

Callets. Wenches. 

Carlin. Old wife. 

Carlyle, Alexander. P. 21. 

Carlyle, James. P. 11. 

Carlyle, Thomas. 
Birth of. P. 11. 
Early education. P. 13. 
Enters University of Edinburgh. 

P. 13. 
Becomes divinity student. P. 14. 
Mathematical instructor in An- 
nan School. P. 14. 
Master of Kirkcaldy classical 

school. P. 14. 
Begins the study of law. P, 15. 
Writes for Brewster's Eacyclo- 

pcedia P. 16. 
Enters upon his literary career. 

P. 16. 
Visits London. P. 17. 
Meets Miss Welsh. P. 18. 
Marries. P. 19. 
Moves to London. P. 22. 



Elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh 

University. P. 22. 
Dies. P. 22. 

Character of, contrasted with 
Burns. P. 29. 

Cauld. Cold. 

Cluttering. Shivering. 

Combe, John a. A wealthy, but 
unpopular neighbor of Shak- 
spere. The latter is said to have 
written a satirical epitaph upon 
him. P. 44, 1. 20. 

Comely Bank. P. 19. 

Constable's Miscellany. See 
p. 131, note to p. 46, 1. 27. 

Craigenputtock, P. 21. 

Cranreuch. Hoar-frost. 

Crqckford's. "A famous gaming 
club-house at No. 50, on the west 
side of St James street, London. 
It Was built by William Crock- 
ford, originally a fishmonger, in 
1827."— The Century Cyclopaedia of 
Names. P. 65, 1. 4. 

"Daisy." See p. 133, note to p. 53, 1. 5. 

Deil. Devil. 

Dinna. Do not. 

" Doctrine of Rent." See p. 138, 
note to p. 88, 1. 10. 

Douce. Sober, respectable. 

Doure. Stubborn. 

Dowie. Disheartened. 

Dribble. Drizzle. 

Dumfries. P. 28. 

Dunlop, Mrs. See p. 135, note to 
p. 61, 1. 13. 

ECCLEFECHAN. P. 11. 

Edinburgh Review. P. 20. 

Ee. Eye. 

Ellisland. P. 28. 

Excise Commissioners. A board 
or bureau charged with the collec- 
tion of internal revenue. P. 44, 
1.30. 
See p. 134, note to p. 55, 1. 8. 

Faither. Father. 

Fell. Keen, biting. 



GLOSSARY 



145 



Ferguson. See p. 133, note top. 50, 

1.12. 
Fu\ Pull. 
Gate. Way. 

Giaours (jowrs.) A term often 
used by Byron. The Turkish 
epithet for Christians, meaning 
infidels. P. 58, 1.28. 
Gies. Gives. 

Gin-hokse. A horse that goes 
round and round in a circle 
turning some kind of a mill or me- 
chanical contrivance. P 129, 1. 11. 
Glowr. Gleam. 

Grays and Glovers.— The refer- 
ence is to Thomas Gray, the well- 
known poet, and to Richard Glover, 
an unimportant contemporary of 
Gray. This association of names 
betokens a decided underestimate 
of the Elegy Written in a Country 
Churchyard, P. 85, 1. 25. 
Greexock. P. 27. 
Guid-man'(or gude). The man of 

the house. 
Guid-wonian. The woman of the 

house. 
Gumlie. Muddy. 
Hae. Have. 
Haddington. P. 18. 
Happing. Hopping. 
Hing. Hang. 
Hoddam Hill. P. 13. 
Hoo. How. 
Hoose. House. 
Idol- priests. See p. 142, note to p. 

127, 1. 27. 
Ilk. Each. 
Influence of Carlyle on Other 

Writers. P. 37. 
Irvine. P. 25. 
Irving, Edward. P. 14. 
Isle of Dogs. A peninsula formed 
by a sudden bend of the Thames 
opposite Greenwich, reached by 
boat from London Bridge in a 
few minutes. P. 129, 1. 24. 



Ither. Other. 
Jaups. Splashes 

Jean Paul The literary pseudo- 
nym of Johann Paul Friedrich 
Ricnter, a German writer (1763- 
1825 ), whose published works reach 
sixty volumes. Carlyle wrote a 
review of Richter, to whom he 
thought he owed much. P. 124,1. 15. 
Jeffrey, Francis. P. 20. 
Ken. Know. » 

Kilmarnock. P. 27. 
Kirkcaldy (Ker-caw'-dy). P. 14. 
Kirkoswald. P. 24. 
La Fleche. A French city on an 
affluent of the lower Loire where 
Hume resided for four years and 
wrote some of his earlier works. 
P. 87, 1. 13. 
Lairing. Miring. 
Langsyne. Long since. 
Lift. Sky, heavens. 
Linking. Tripping along. 
Lochlea. P. 24. 

Lowe, Sir Hudson. The British 
commander of St. Helena, where 
Napoleon ended his days a pris- 
oner. P. 51,1. 24. 
Lucy, Sir Thomas. A gentleman 
in the neighborhood of Stratford 
who is said to have had the young 
Shakspere and his boon compan- 
ions up before him for poaching 
in his deer park. Does Carlyle 
consider that a life of Shakspere, 
by his early neighbors, would be 
valuable? P. 44, 1. 19. 
Macpherson. Macpherson was a 
noted Scottish freebooter, hanged 
in 1700. P. 77, 1.17. 
M.ecenases. An awkward word 
derived from Maecenas, the lit- 
erary patron of Virgil and Horace. 
The reference is to the Dumfries 
aristocracy. P. 108, 1. 2 
Mainhill. P. 14. 
Mair. More. 



146 



GLOSSARY 



Mauchline. P. 25. 

Mauna. Must not. 

Maut. Malt. 

Men'. Mend. 

Minerva Press. A London print- 
ing house, prolific of trashy novels. 
P. 64, 1. 1. 

Mossgiel. P. 25. 

Mt. Oliphant. P. 24. 

Muckle. Much. 

Nae. No. 

Naething. Nothing. 

"Natural History of Religion." 
See p. 138, note to p. 8S, 1. ri. 

New and Old Light. Terms ap- 
plied to the radical and conserva- 
tive factions of tne Church of 
Scotland. P. 45, 1. 4. 

Novum Organum. The chief philo- 
sophical work of Francis Bacon, 
by many considered the founder 
of modern science. P. 71, 1. 22. 

O'. Of. 

Ony. Any. 

Ourie. Shivering. 

Ower. Over. 

Patronage. See p. 140, note to p. 
115, 1. 6. 

Plebiscita (plural of Plebisci- 
tum). Originally laws enacted 
in ancient Rome by the lower rank 
of citizens. Now chiefly used by 
the French to designate a popular 
vote. The decision of the common 
people. P. 128, 1.27. 

Poussin. A noted French painter 
of historical and landscape pic- 
tures. " The Deluge," painted for 
Cardinal Richelieu, hangs in the 
Louvre with many of his best 
works, " admired rather as a 
duty than enjoyed by the spec- 
tator.'" Carlyle visited Paris in 
1824, hence, no doubt, the allusion. 
P. 68, 1. 31. 

Ramsey, Allan. A Scottish poet 
(1686-1758). He wrote of real shep- 



herds on Scottish hills, and may 
be regarded as the founder of 
that natural, unaffected school of 
Scottish poets which reached 
its culmination in Burns. P. 50, 
1.12. 

Ramsgate. A watering-place on 
the Isle of Thanet, sixty five miles 
from London. P. 129, 1. 23. 

Rantingly. Full of life. 

Raucle. Rough. 

Red-wat-shod. Wading in biood. 

Restaurateur. The keeper of an 
inn, or restaurant. Carlyle de 1 
fends Burns against the charge, 
then current, that he was a mere 
bar-room or public house versifier, 
providing entertainment for the 
house. P. 120, 1. 11. 

Retzsch. A German artist famous 
for his etchings illustrative of 
Goethe and Schiller's works, in 
which Carlyle was deeply read. 
P. 67,1. 19. 

Rottonkey. Given in critical edi- 
tions of Burns's poems as Ratton- 
key, which means the landing or 
quay of rats, i.e., infested by rats. 
P. 68, 1. 27. 

Rowes. Rolls. 

Sae. So. 

Saloons. In the European, and 
particularly the French, use of 
the word, it means reception rooms 
or parlors. P. 64, 1. 26. 

Sang. Song. 

Scaur. Cliff. 

SCOTSBRIG. P. 18. 

Si vis me flere. See p. 134, note to 

p. 57, 1. 13. 
Slop, Dr. The quotation is from 

Sterne's Tristam Shandy, in which 

Dr. Slop is a character. P. 75, 1. 15. 
Snaw. Snow. 
Snaw-broo (snow-brew). Water 

and slush. 
Snawy. Snowy. 



GLOSSARY 



147 



Speat. Torrent. 

Sprattle. Scramble. 

Spring. A lively dunce. 

Straw roof. See p. 133, note to p. 

5)5, 1. 30. 
Style, Carlyle's. See p. 31. 
Suld. Should. 
Sutply and Demand, Maxim 

of. See p. 131, note to p 43, 1. 4. 
Tak. Take. 
Tain. Thomas. 
Tarbolton. P. '24. 
Tell't (telled). Told. 
Teniers. A Flemish painter of 

peasant and village scenes. P 81, 

1. 25. 
Theocritus. See p. 136, note to p. 

66, 1. 1. 
Theory ok Litkhatpke, Car- 

LYLE'S. P. 37. 

Thole. Endure. 

Thowes. Thaws. 

Tieck — MrsAus. Two German 
poets who drew their material 
from the folk-lore of their native 
laud. Tieck entered the more 
fully into the spirit of times past. 



Carlyle had translated from hoth 
and held the lir.-a in high esteem. 
P. 79, 1. 30. 

Upo'. Upon. 

Valclusa Fountain. The foun- 
tain of Vaucluse, ton miles east of 
Avignon. A mountain stream 
issues from this fountain, made 
famous by the poet Petrarch, who 
lived here and sung its praises. 
P. 130, 1. 4 

VlRGILIUM V1DI TANTl'M. (Ovidl. 

"I had a glimpse at least of 

Virgil." P. 100, 1. 25. 
Vocabulary, Car i. yi. b's. P. 32. 
Wad. Would. 
Wae (woe!. Sorry. 
Wee. Tiny, little. 
Weel. Well. 

Welsh, Jane Baim.ie. P. 18. 
Werna. Were not. 
Wha. Who 
Wi\ With. 
Wreeths. Wreaths. 
Writers. Attorneys, not iiterary 

men. P. 45, 1. 3. 
Yon,, Yonder. 



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